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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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A CHILD’S ROMANCE 


BY 


PIERRE LOTI 


Author of ‘“t Rarahu,” etc. 


TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH 


BY 


Mrs. CLARA BELL 


a 


AUTHORIZED EDITION 


REVISED AND CORRECTED IN THE UNITED STATES 


NEW YORK 
W. S. GOTTSBERGER & CO., PUBLISHERS 
Il MUBRAY STREET 
1891 


fC RAA 


ron 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891 
By W. S. GOTTSBERGER-& CO. 


in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington 


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THIS TRANSLATION WAS MADE EXPRESSLY FOR THE PUBLISHERS 


TO HER MAJESTY 


ELIZABETH 
QUEEN OF ROUMANIA. 


December, 188... 


Tt is almost too late in my life to undertake this book ; 
a kind of night is already closing in on me, how can I 
find words fresh and young enough ? 


T shall begin it to-morrow at sea; at least [ will en- 
deavour to put into it all that was best in me ata time 
when as yet there was nothing very bad. 


T shall end at an early stage, in order that love may 
find no place in it, excepting in the form of a vague 


aream. 


And TI shall offer it to the sovereign lady who sug- 
gested the idea of writing it as the humble homage 


of fascinated respect. 


PIERRE LOTT. 


? 
aly 


j SPS ire 
My es hies hie 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


i 


T is with a kind of fear that I approach the 
enigma of my impressions at the beginning of 
life, doubting whether indeed I felt them myself, 
or whether they were not, rather, remoter mem- 
ories mysteriously transmitted. I feel a sort of 
religious reluctance to sound those depths. 

On emerging from primeval night my mind 
did not grow gradually to the light by progres- 
sive gleams, but by sudden flashes of illumination, 
which abruptly dilated my childish eyes and fixed 
me in watchful reveries, and which then vanished, 
plunging me once more into the total uncon- 
sciousness of little new-born animals, of infant 
plants that have just begun to sprout. 

At the dawn of life my history would be 
simply that of a much petted, much tended child, 
very obedient and prettily behaved, to whom 


eRe Le, A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





< 
— en eS SS ee 


ec nothing unforeseen could happen in its little 
padded world, and on whom no blow could fall 
that was not deadened by the tenderest solicitude. 

So I make no attempt to write so tedious a 
tale. I will only record, without order or connec- 
tion, certain moments which struck me strangely 
—struck me so that to this day I remember 
them with perfect clearness— now, when I have 
already forgotten so many poignant incidents, so 
many places, and adventures, and faces. 

At that time I was a little like what a swallow 
might be, hatched out yesterday high up on the 
peak of a roof, which should begin to open its 
bright young eye from time to time, and fancy, 
as it looked down into a yard or a street, that it 
saw the depths of the universe and space. Thus, 
during these flashes of perception I furtively dis- 
cerned all sorts of infinitudes of which I no doubt 
possessed latent conceptions in my brain, from 
before my individual existence; then, involun- 
tarily closing the still-dim eye of my spirit, I 
sank back again for days into the original peace- 
ful night. 3 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 3 





At first my brain, still so new and so dark- 
ened, might have been compared to a photo- 
graphic apparatus full of sensitized glasses. On 
these virgin plates, insufficiently illuminated ob- 
jects make no impression; while if, on the con- 
trary, a bright light, of whatever nature, falls on 
them, they become blotted with large light 
patches, on which the unknown external objects 
are presently engraved. — My early memories 
are, in fact, always full of summer sunshine, 
blazing noons, —or else of wood-fires with leap- 


ing red flames. 


j 


II. 


REMEMBER as though it were yesterday 
the evening when, after having been able to 
walk for some little time, I suddenly discovered 
the right way to jump and run, and in my excite- 
ment over this delightful novelty, went on till I 


tumbled. down. 


= 


4 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





It must have been at the beginning of the 
second winter of my life, at the sad hour of 
nightfall. In the dining-room of our home — 
which at that time seemed to me immensely 
spacious —I had been sitting, no doubt but for a 
moment, subdued and quiet under the influence 
of the growing dusk. No lamps as yet were 
lighted anywhere. But the dinner hour was ap- 
proaching, and a maid came in who cast an arm- 
ful of brushwood on the hearth to revive the 
smouldering logs. Then a fine, bright fire, a 
sudden cheerful blaze leaped up, illuminating the 
whole room, and a large, round patch of light fell 
on the middle of the carpet, on the floor, on the 
rug, on the legs of the chairs, on all that lower 
region which was especially mine. And the 
flames flew up, changed, writhed and curled, 
every moment higher and livelier, making the 
long-drawn shadows dance and flicker up the 
wall. — I stood quite upright, full of admiration 
— for I remember now that I had been sitting at 
the feet of my grand-aunt Bertha—even then a 


very old woman — who was napping in her chair 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 5 





near a window where the grey night looked in. 
I was sitting on an old-fashioned foot-warmer 
with two steps; such a comfortable perch for a 
tiny coaxing child, resting its head on its grand- 
mother’s or grand-aunt’s knees. — Well, I stood 
up in an ecstasy, and went nearer to the fire; 
then, within the circle of light on the carpet I 
began to walk round and round, to spin faster 
and faster, and at last, feeling suddenly in my 
legs an unwonted elasticity, something like the 
release of springs, I invented a new and most 
amusing exercise: this was to push very hard 
with my feet against the ground, then to lift up 
both feet at once for an instant, and to drop 
again, and to take advantage of the recoil to go 
up again — and so to go on, again and again, poof, 
poof! making a great deal of noise on the floor, 
and feeling a little pleasant giddiness. From that 
moment I knew how to jump, I knew how to run! 

I am quite sure that it was for the first time, I 
remember so clearly my extreme amusement and 
gleeful surprise. 

“Why, bless me! What has come over the 


6 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





child this Lvduior >” said my grand-aunt Bertha, 
somewhat uneasy. I can hear her abrupt tones 
now. 

But still I jumped. Like the little foolish in- 
sects, drunk with light, which whirl round the lamp 
of an evening, I still jumped in the bright patch 
which spread, and shrank, and changed its shape, 
the borders wavering as the flames rose and fell. 
And all this is so present to me still that my eye 
recalls every line of the carpet on which it took 
place. It was made of a certain everlasting 
material woven in the neighbourhood by country 
weavers, and now quite out of fashion; it was 
called nouzs. The house we then lived in was 
still as it had been arranged by my maternal 
grandmother when she had decided on quitting 
the zsland to settle on the mainland. (I shall 
have more to say about this zs/and, which ere 
long assumed a mysterious charm for my baby 
imagination). It was a very unpretending coun- 
try-house, where Huguenot austerity was plainly 
felt, and where immaculate cleanliness and order 


were the only luxuries. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. ’ 





Well, in the patch of light, which was now 
decidedly diminishing, I still jumped. But even 
while I jumped I was thinking with an intensity 
which certainly was not habitual. With my little 
legs, my mind too had been roused; a brighter 
light had been struck in my brain, where the 
dawn of ideas was as yet sodim. And it is, no 
doubt, to this mental awakening that this brief 
moment of my life owes its unfathomable inner 
side, especially the persistency with which it 
remains ineffaceably graven on my memory. 
But in vain do I endeavour to find words to 
express all this, while its infinite depths escape 
me. — There I was, looking at the chairs in a 
row close to the wall, and as I recollected the 
grown-up persons — grandmothers, grand-aunts 
and aunts, who commonly sat on them, who pres- 
ently would come and sit on them. Why were 
they not there now? At this moment I longed 
for their presence as a protection. They were 
up-stairs, no doubt, in their rooms, on the second 
floor; between them and me there was the dark 


staircase — a staircase full of shadows which made 


8 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

me quake. — And my mother? Above all I 
wished for her; but she, I knew, was out in the 
long streets of which the ends were beyond my 
ken, far away and dim. I had myself seen her 
out of the house, asking her: “You will come 
back again?” And she had promised that she 
certainly would come back. (I have since been 
told that when I was quite a little child I never 
let any one of the family go out of the house, 
even for the smallest errand or call, without as- 
suring myself of their intending to return: “ You 
are sure you will come back ?” was the question I 
was wont to ask anxiously, after following those 
who were going out, as far as the door). So my 
mother was out — it gave me a little tightness 
about the heart to know that she was out. 

The streets! I was very glad that I was not 
out in the streets, where it was cold and dark, 
and where little children might be lost. It was 
so comfortable here in front of the warming 
flames — so comfortable zz my own home!  Per- 
haps I had never understood this as I did this 


evening; perhaps this was my first genuine im- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 9 





pression of attachment to the family hearth, and 
of melancholy uneasiness at the thought of the 
vast unknown outside. It must also have been 
the first conscious impulse of affection for those 
venerable faces of aunts and grandmothers which 
surrounded my infancy, and which, at that hour 
of dusky, twilight qualms, I longed to see, all in 


their accustomed places, seated in a circle round 


Meanwhile the beautiful wayward flames in 
the chimney seemed to be dying; the armful of 
small wood had burnt out, and, as the lamp was 
not yet lighted it was darker than before. I had 
already had one tumble on the carpet without 
hurting myself, and had begun again, more eager 
than ever. Now and then I found a strange 
delight in going into the darkest nooks where 
vague terrors came over me of nameless things ; 
and then returning to safety within the circle of 
light, looking back with a shiver to see whether 
anything had come behind me out of the black 
corners, to follow and catch me. 


Presently, the flames having quite died out, I 


IO A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








was really frightened; Aunt Bertha, too motion- 
less in her chair, whose eyes I felt upon me, no 
longer gave me a sense of protection. The 
chairs even, the chairs set all round the room, 
began to disquiet me by their tall dancing 
shadows which leapt up behind them at the 
pleasure of the dying flare, exaggerating the 
height of their tall backs against the wall. And 
above all there was a door, half open to a dark 
anteroom which led to the big dining-room, yet 
more empty and black... Oh! That door. I 
gazed at it now with a fixed stare, and nothing in 
the world would have made me dare to turn my 
back on it. 

This was the beginning of the winter-evening 
terrors which, even in that well-beloved home, 
brought much gloom into my childhood. 

The thing I dreaded to see had as yet no 
definite form; it was not till later that my visions 
took a shape. But my fear was not therefore the 
less real, and transfixed me with wide open eyes 
in front of the fire which no longer gave any 


light, — when, on a sudden, from the other side, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. Ir 





through another door, my mother came in. Oh, 
how I flung myself upon her! I hid my head, I 
wrapped myself in her skirts. This was the 
supreme protection, the refuge where nothing 
could harm me, the nest of all nests where every- 
thing was forgotten. And from that moment the 
thread of my reminiscences is broken; I can 


follow it no further. 


ELE, 


FTER the ineffaceable image left by that 
first fright, and that first dance in front of a 
winter’s blaze, months must have passed by with- 
out leaving any mark on my brain. I had re- 
lapsed into the gloaming of life’s beginnings, 
across which flit only wavering and confused 
visions — grey or rose-coloured in the hues of 

dawn. 
I think that my next impression was one 


which I will try to record: an impression of 


12 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





—— en 


summer, of broad sunshine, and of nature, and of 
a delicious panic at finding myself alone in the 
deep June grass taller than my head. But here 
the undercurrent is still more complicated, more 
mingled with things antecedent to my present 
existence; I feel that I must lose myself in them 
without succeeding in expressing anything. 

It happened in a country-house called Za 
Limotse, which at a later date played an impor- 
tant part in my child-life. It belonged to some 
very old friends of our family, the D***, who were 
our neighbours in town, their house almost touch 
ing ours. Possibly I had already been at Limoise 
the summer before, but at the stage of a white 
doll in arms. The day of which I am about to 
speak was certainly the first which I had spent 
there as a little creature capable of thought, of 
grief, of dreams. 

I have forgotten the beginning — the de- 
parture, the journey, and the arrival. But I can 
see myself one very hot afternoon, see myself 
very happy alone in the neglected old garden, en- 


closed by grey walls overgrown with moss and 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 13 
lichen, from the woods, sandy heaths, and stony 
commons that surrounded it. For me, a town- 
bred child, this spacious garden, never kept up, 
where the fruit-trees were perishing of old age, 
was as full of surprises and mysteries as the 
virgin forest. Having, no doubt, stepped over a 
high box edging, I had lost myself in the middle 
of one of the uncultured beds far from the house, 
among I know not what wayward growths— 
asparagus run to seed I daresay —tangled with 
wild creepers. There I had squatted down after 
the manner of little children, to bury myself in all 
this, which was far above my head even when I 
stood up. And I kept very still, with eyes dilated 
and my mind attent, at once alarmed and de- 
lighted. What I felt in the presence of these new 
things was, even then, less astonishment than re- 
membrance; that lavish greenery which closed in 
upon me I knew was everywhere, in the remotest 
depths of the unseen country; I felt it all about 
me, melancholy, immense, vaguely apprehended 
already. It frightened and yet it attracted me — 
and in order to stay there as long as possible 


14 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





without being sought out, I hid myself more 
completely, with the look on my face, no doubt of 
a little Red-skin in glee at finding his forest 
again. 

But suddenly I heard myself called: “ Pierre ! 
Pierre! My little Pierrot!” And without reply- 
ing I made haste to lie down flat on the earth 
under the weeds and the finely cut leaves of the 
fennel-like asparagus branches. 

Again: ‘Pierre! Pierre!’ — It was Lucette. 

I knew her voice, and I even understood from her 
laughing tone that she spied me in my green 
lurking-place. But I could notsee her. I looked 
about on all sides, in vain. No one! Still she 
called me with shouts of laughter, her voice more 
and more full of fun. Where in the world could 
she be ? : | | 
* Ah! Up there, high in the air, perched in 
the fork of a strangely twisted tree, which had 
what looked like a ‘hoary head of lichen:; 

Then I got up, greatly disgusted at having 
been thus discovered, And as I rose’I perceived 


from: afar, above:the* tangle of ‘wild plants, a 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 15 





corner of the old ivy-crowned walls, which sur- 
rounded the garden. Those walls were to 
become very familiar to me as time went on, for 
during my half-holidays from school I have spent 
many an hour perched at the top, looking out 
over the peaceful pastoral landscape, dreaming, to 
the chirp of the grasshoppers, of yet more sunny 
spots in distant lands. And on that particular 
day their mortarless grey stones, scorching in the 
sun and blotted with patches of lichen, gave me 
for the first time in my life an undefined impres- 
sion of the oldness of things, a vague conception 
of stretches of time before my life, — of the Past. 

Lucette D***, older than I by eight or ten 
years, was in my eyes almost a grown-up person. 
I could not have known her long, but I- had 
known her as long as I could know anything. 
After this I loved her as a sister; and. then her 
early death was one of my first real griefs as a 
little boy. : 

This is my first recollection of her—an ap- 
parition among the boughs of an old apple-tree. 


“nd even that has held its ground merely by the 


16 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





association of the two new feelings with which it 
was mingled: a fascinated uneasiness in the pres- 
ence of the invading greenery of Nature, and a 
dreamy regretfulness as I looked at the old walls, 
for old things, and a bygone time. 


EM. 


I SHOULD now like to try to describe the im- 

pression made on me by the sea on the occa- 
sion of our first interview — which was a short 
and dreary téte-a-téte. 

This impression, as an exception — was a twi- 
light effect; it was almost too dark to see, and 
yet the image, as it appeared to me, was so 
intense as to remain stamped at one blow and for 
ever. And to this day I feel a retrospective 
thrill when I concentrate my mind on this re- 
membrance. 

I had. arrived late in the day, with my 
parents, at a village on the coast of Saintonge, at 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 17 





a fisherman’s cottage let for the bathing season. 
I knew that we had come for what was called the 
sea, but I had not yet seen it; a ridge of sand- 
hills hid it from me by reason of my being so 
small — and I was ina state of great impatience 
to make its acquaintance. So after dinner, as it 
was growing dusk, I slipped out alone. The 
sharp briny air had a smell of something un- 
known, and a strange sound, low but immense, 
was audible behind the little humps of sand to 
which a path led. 

Everything was fearsome to me—the bit of 
unknown path, the twilight under a, cloudy sky, 
and the very solitude of this corner of a village. 
However, strong in one of those sudden resolu- 
tions which the most timid creatures sometimes 
form, I set out with a firm step. 

Then suddenly I stood still, rigid and shiver- 
ing with terror. In front of me lay something — 
something dark and sounding, which had risen up 
on all sides at once and seemed to be without 
end; a spread of motion which gave me a deadly 


sense of giddiness. That was it, evidently; not 


18 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








an instant of doubt, nor even of surprise at its 
being like this; no, nothing but awe; I recog- 
nized it and trembled. It was of an obscure 
green, almost black; it looked unstable, treacher- 
ous, greedy; it was seething and raving every- 
where at once with sinister malignity. Above it 
stretched the sky in unbroken leaden-grey, like a 
heavy cloak. 

Very far, and only very far away, in the un- 
measurable depths of the horizon there was a 
rent, a slit between the clouds and the waters, a 
long vacant rift of dim yellow pallor. 

Now to recognize the sea, as I did, had I seen 
it before ? — Perhaps, unconsciously, in the island 
when, at the age of five or six months I had been 
taken to see a grand-aunt, my grandmother’s 
sister. Or had it been so often gazed at by my 
sailor ancestors that I was born with some con- 
fused reflection in my mind of its vast expanse. 

We remained face to face a moment — J, 
fascinated by the sight. From that very first in- 
terview, no doubt, I had an undefinable presenti- 


ment that the sea would at length some day take 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 19 


possession of me, in spite of all my hesitancy, in 
spite of all the wills which would combine to 
withhold me. What I felt in its presence was not 
simple dread, but above all a nameless melan- 
choly, a sense of desolate solitude, desertion and 
exile. And I turned away, running with my face 
very much puckered up I should suppose, and my 
hair tossed by the wind, in the greatest haste to 
be with my mother again, to throw my arms 
round her and cling to her; to be comforted for a 
thousand coming and unutterable woes which had 
wrung my heart at the sight of those vast green 
depths. 


We 


Y mother. — In the course of these notes I 
have already incidentally mentioned her 
name twice or thrice, but without dwelling on 
it. — At first, as it seems, she was no more to me 
than the natural refuge, the sanctuary from all 


the terrors of the unknown, all the black troubles 


\ 


20 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





which had no definite cause. But I think that 
the very earliest moment at which her image was 
stamped on my mind as very living and real, ina 
glory of true and ineffable tenderness, was one 
morning in the month of May when she came 
into my room, followed by a beam of sunshine, 
and bringing me a bunch of pink hyacinths. I 
was recovering from some childish ailment — 
measles, or whooping-cough, or something of .the 
kind. — I had been condemned to stay in bed, to 
keep very warm, and as by the streaks of light 
which crept in through my shuttered windows I 
could guess the revived splendour of the sun and 
air, I was very forlorn inside the curtains of my 
white bed; I wanted to get up, to go out; above 
all to see my mother, my mother at any cost. 
The door opened and my mother came in 
smiling. Oh! I can see her now as I saw her 
then in the doorway, bringing with her some of 
the sunshine and breeze from without. It is all 
before me: the expression of her eyes as they 
looked into mine, the sound of her voice, the very 


details of her beloved, familiar dress which now- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 21 








a-days would look so old-world. She had come 
in from some morning errand in the town. She 
wore a straw bonnet with yellow roses and a lilac 
barége shawl—it was in the time of shawls — 
printed with little bunches of flowers in a darker 
shade. Her black curls —those poor, dear curls, 
which have not altered in style, but now, alas! are 
thinner and quite white— were then unstreaked 
by a thread of silver. There was a fragrance 
about her of sunshine and summer which she had 
caught out of doors. Her face that’ morning, 
framed in a bonnet with a deep curtain as it was 
called, is vividly before my eyes. 

Besides the bunch of pink hyacinths she also 
brought me a little doll’s jug and basin, exactly 
copied in miniature from the flowered earthen- 
ware which the country people use. 

She bent over my bed to kiss me, and then I 
wanted nothing more — not to cry, not to get up, 
not to go out; she was there and that was 
enough; I was entirely comforted, soothed, trans- 
formed, by her beneficent presence. 

I must have been a little more than three 


22 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





years old at that time, and my mother about 
forty-two. But I had not the smallest idea of 
my mother’s age; it never entered my head to 
wonder whether she were young or old; it was 
not indeed till somewhat later that I discovered 
that she was very pretty. No; at that time it 
* was She, and that was all; as much as to say that 
the face was to me unique, — never to be com- 
pared with any other — from which there beamed 
on me joy, safety, and tenderness, from which all 
good emanated, including infant faith and prayer. 

On this first appearance in my book of mem- 
ories, of that thrice blessed face, I would fain, if it 
were possible, greet it with words made on pur- 
pose for her, such as indeed do not exist; words 
which of themselves should make tears of healing 
flow, and should have I know not what sweetness 
of consolation and forgiveness; which should 
include, too, a persistent hope, unfailing and 
invincible, of an eternal reunion in Heaven. For, 
since I have touched on this mystery and this il- 
logical vein in my mind, I will here say, by the 


way, that my mother is the only living soul from 


A, CHILD’S ROMANCE. 23 


whom I do not feel that death will divide me for 
ever. With other human beings whom I have 
loved with all the powers of my heart and soul, I 
have tried passionately to imagine any kind of 
hereafter, a morrow somewhere else, a something 
—I know not what—immaterial and everlast- 
ing; but no — nothing —I cannot; J have 
always had a horrible consciousness of abysmal 
nothingness, very dust of very dust. 

But with regard to my mother I have pre- 
served my early beliefs almost intact. Still, me- 
seems that when I shall have done with playing 
my poor little part in this world, have done with 
seeking the impossible over endless unbeaten 
tracks, have done with amusing other folks by 
my fatigues and torments, I shall go to rest 
somewhere, welcomed by my mother who will 
have led the way; and the smile of serene assur- 
ance which she now wears will then have become 
a smile of triumphant knowledge. I do not, to 
be sure, very clearly see that dim Somewhere; it 
looms before me pale and grey, and words, how- 


ever vague and indefinite they may be, give too 


24 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





precise a form to the dreamlike vision. And even 
there —I know how childish what I am going 
to say must be — even there I picture my mother 
under her present earthly aspect, with her dear 
erey curls, and the fine lines of her pretty profile, 
which years are gradually defacing but which I 
still admire. The thought that my mother’s face 
may some day vanish for ever from my sight, 
that it can be no more than a combination of ele- 
ments liable to disintegration and to be lost 
beyond recovery in the universal void — this 
thought not only makes my heart bleed, but 
shocks me, as a_thing inconceivable and mon- 
strous. Ah! no. I feel that there is something 
exceptional in that face which Death cannot 
touch. And my love for my mother, which has 
been the only unchanging love of my life, is alto- 
sether so free from every material tie that it alone 
is almost enough to give me confidence in one in- 
destructible thing, namely the soul; and gives me 
at times a sort of inexplicable forlorn hope. 

I cannot quite understand why this appear- 


ance of my mother by the side of my little sick- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 25 
bed that morning should have struck me so 
much as she was constantly with me. Here 
again there is a very mysterious underside; it is 
as though she had at that particular moment been 
revealed to me for the first time in my life. 

And why, among the toys I have cherished, 
has that little doll’s jug acquired, without any will 
of mine, a special value, and the importance of a 
relic? To such a degree that when far away, at 
sea, and in moments of danger, I have thought of 
it with pathetic affection, and pictured it in the 
place where it has stood for years among other 
fragmentary treasures in a certain cupboard, 
never opened; to such a degree that if it were to 
disappear I should have lost an amulet for which 
nothing could -be a substitute. That old lilac 
shawl too, which I recognized not long since 
among a heap of old clothes set aside to be given 
to the poor,—why did I have it rescued as a 
precious possession? In its hue, now faded, in 
its quaint old-fashioned flowers of Indian design, 
I still find tender protection and a smile; I even 


believe that I find soothing in it, sweet con- 


26 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





fidence, almost faith; it exhales a perfect emana- 
tion of my mother, mingling perhaps with fond 
regret for the May mornings of yore, which were 
brighter than those of to-day. 

Really I am afraid this book will be terribly 
dull to a great many people —and there is more 
in it of myself than I have ever yet written. 

As I write it, in the calm night-watches which 
are so favourable to memories, the exquisite 
Queen to whom I desire to dedicate it is always 
present to my thoughts; it is like a long letter 
written to her in the certainty of being under- 
stood to the very end and even beyond it, in 
those depths for which there are no words. 

And perhaps, too, I shall be understood by 
unknown friends who follow me with kind but 
distant sympathy. For, indeed, no man who 
loves, or has loved, his mother, will smile at the 
childish things I have just said, I am quite sure. 

Only to some, to whom such a love is un- 
known, this chapter will no doubt appear ridicu- 
lous. But those cannot conceive of the scorn I 


have for them in return for their shrugs. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 27 





MEL 


O end this enumeration of the confused pic- 

tures surviving from my earliest infancy I 
must here again speak of a sunbeam —a sad one 
this time — which has left its ineffaceable traces 
on me, and of which the sense will never be 
interpreted. 

It was on returning from divine service one 
Sunday that this sunbeam fell on me. It came 
in on the staircase through a window set ajar, and 
lay in a strange patch of light on the whiteness of 
a wall. I had come home from church* alone 
with my mother, and mounted the stairs holding 
her hand; the silent house had the resonance 
peculiar to very hot summer noons—it must 
have been in August or September — and, as is 
the custom in our part of the world, the half- 
closed outside shutters made twilight during the 


hours of fierce sunshine. 


* Du Temple. Meaning a French protestant church. 


28 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





The instant I entered the house I had a 
gloomy sense of the Sabbath rest which, in 
country places, and quiet out-of-the-way ends of 
small towns, is like arrested vitality; but when I 
saw the shaft of light which shot obliquely across 
the stairs from the window, the pang of sadness 
was far more keen; something quite incompre- 
hensible and altogether new, with an innate 
notion, perhaps, of the brevity of the summers of 
life, of their swift flight, and of the eternal in- 
difference of their suns. But other and more 
mysterious elements were mingled with it which 
it would be impossible to suggest however 
vaguely. 

And to this history of the sunbeam I will only 
add a sequel which is to me closely bound up 
with it. Years and years had passed by: I had 
become a man, had seen the uttermost ends of 
the earth, and known every kind of adventure, 
when, as it fell, I spent an autumn and winter in 
a solitary house in a suburb of Stamboul. There, 
on the wall of my staircase, every evening at the 


same hour, a sunbeam, falling through a window, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 29 





lay aslant; it lighted up a sort of niche hollowed 
in the wall, in which I had placed an Athenian 
amphora. Well, I never saw that sunbeam with- 
out remembering the other, the Sunday sun of 
my childhood, or without feeling the same — pre- 
cisely the same—jimpression of sadness, hardly 
weakened by time, and as full of mystery as ever. 
Then, when the time came for me to leave 
Turkey, to leave that dangerous little house at 
Stamboul which I had loved, added to all the 
pangs of departing there was this strange regret: 
that never again should I see the slanting sun fall 
obliquely across the stairs to rest on the niche 
and the Greek jar. 

Beneath all this there must evidently be, if 
not reminiscences of personal pre-existence, at any 
rate some incoherent reproduction of the thoughts 
of ancestors —things which I am unable to re- 
suscitate from their darkness and dust. — In 
short, I see, I know no more. I have got back 
into the domain of dreams which evade me, of 
vapours blown away, of the intangible nothing. 


And all this chapter, almost unintelligible as 


30 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








it is, has no excuse but that it has been written 
with a great effort at sincerity, and absolute 


truthfulness. 


Vit, 


PRING-TIME in the fresh glories of May on 

a lonely road known as the Fountains road. 

— I have tried to arrange these memories to 
some extent in order of dates; I may have been 
five by this time. Old enough therefore to walk 
out with my father and sister; and there I was, 
one dewy morning, in rapture at seeing every- 
thing become so green, the leaves growing so 
broad, the shrubs so bushy. By the side of the 
paths the plants, all coming up together, like a 
huge bouquet sprouting all at once from the 
whole earth, had blossomed out in a delicious 
tangle of pink herb-robert and blue speedwell ; 
and I pulled them and pulled more, not knowing 
which to run to, trampling on them, wetting my 


legs with dew, amazed at the wealth at my feet, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 31 





longing to pluck handfuls and carry all away. 
My sister, who held a bough of hawthorn, 
and flags, and tall grasses like aigrettes, bent 
down and taking my hand led me off, saying: 
“Come, that is enough for once; we could never 
gather them all, you see.” But I paid no heed, 
positively intoxicated by the magnificence before 
me, and not remembering ever having seen the 
like. 

This was not the first of those walks with my 
father and sister, which for a long time —till the 
dismal days of copy-books, lessons and tasks — 
recurred almost every day, so that I very soon 
knew every road in the neighbourhood and the 
varieties of flowers to be gathered there. 

Those infertile tracts of my native province, 
monotonous but none the less dear; monotonous, 
level, uniform; meadows of hay and ox-eye 
daisies — where, in those days, I could be lost, 
disappearing among the green stems; and corn- 
fields, and lanes hedged with hawthorn. Out to 
the west, on the furthest horizon, I would gaze in 


search of the sea which sometimes, when we had 


32 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








walked a long way, could be seen above the flat 
line of the coast, a tiny strip of blue, more abso- 
lutely level—and dragging me to itself slowly, 
slowly, like a huge patient lodestone, sure of its 
power and able to wait. 

My sister, and my brother whom I have not 
yet mentioned, were many years older than I, so 
that it seemed — especially in those early days — 
as though I were of a later generation. 

So they, too, were there to spoil me, besides 
my father and mother, my grandmothers, aunts 
and grand-aunts. And I, the only child among 
them all, shot up like a shrub too well cared for 
in a greenhouse, too much sheltered, too ig- 


norant of the copse and thorn-brake. 


Viti. 


T has been suggested that those persons who 
are most gifted with the power of painting — 


whether with colours or with words—are per- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. De 








haps in a way, purblind, living habitually in a 
dim light, a lunar fog, their gaze turned inwards; 
and that therefore, when by good-hap they see, 
they are impressed ten times more vividly than 
other men. 

This strikes me as a paradox. Still, it is 
certain that a dim light predisposes us to see 
better; as, in a panorama show, the darkened 
vestibule prepares the eye for the final triumph of 
illusion. 

In the course of my life, therefore, I should, I 
daresay, have been less strongly impressed by the 
changeful phantasmagoria of the world, if I had 
not begun the journey among almost colourless 
surroundings, in the quietest corner of the most 
humdrum little town, receiving an austerely re- 
ligious education, and my longest travels limited 
to the woods of fa Limotse — to me as unexplored 
as the primeval forest—or the strand of the 
island where some notion of immensity was 
spread before my eyes, when I paid a visit to my 
old aunts at Saint-Pierre d’Oleron. 

It was in the back garden of our own house 


3 


34 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








that I spent the brightest of my summers. That 
seemed to me my special domain and I delighted 
in it. 

Really very pretty was that pleasance; more 
sunny and airy, and flowery than most town- 
gardens. There was a sort of long avenue of 
green branches and flowers, shut in on the south 
by a low old wall over-garlanded with roses and 
honeysuckles, with the tops of fruit-trees in the 
neighbouring gardens showing above it; a long, 
flowery alley, with an illusory effect of great 
extent, in perspective under trellices of vine and 
jasmine to a corner where it opened out like a 
large bowery room, to end at a cellar house of 
very ancient masonry, the grey stones hidden 
under creepers and ivy. 

Oh! how I loved that garden; how [ love it 
still ! 

The deepest and earliest memories I have 
kept of it are those, I think, of the fine long 
summer evenings. To come home from a walk 
in the evening, in the warm transparent twilights 


— which were certainly more exquisite then than 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 35 





they are now; to come into that back-plot filled 
with the sweetest odours of datura and honey- 
suckle, and to see from the gate the long ranks 
of drooping boughs! Below the first arbour, 
pleached with Virginian jasmine, a gap in the 
greenery admitted a still-luminous patch of wes- 
tern red. And far away at the other end, among 
the darkened masses of foliage, three or four 
persons were seen, quietly seated on chairs; in 
black gowns, to be sure, and motionless; but, 
even so, comfortable to behold, well known and 
well beloved: mother, grandmother, aunts. Then 
I set out to run and fling myself on their knees, — 
and that was one of the most amusing incidents 
of my day. 


IX. 


WO children, quite little children, sitting very 
close together on low stools, in a large room 
where the shades were gathering as dusk fell in 


the month of March. Two little things of five or 


36 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








six, in short drawers and blouses, and white pina- — 


fores over them, in the fashion of that day; very 
quiet now—after playing the very mischief — 
and amusing themselves in a corner with pencils 
and scraps of paper, only a little uneasy with 
vague alarm at the waning light. 

_Of these two babies only one was drawing — 
that was I. The other, asked to spend the day 


as a rare treat, watched my work, getting as near 


as he could. With some difficulty, but full of — 


confidence, he followed the vagaries of my pencil — 





which I took care to explain as I went on. And | 


explanation was in fact necessary, for I was ex- — 


ecuting two sentimental subjects which I entitled: 
The Happy Duck and the Unhappy Duck. 

The room in which we were may have been 
furnished in 1805, when the poor, very old grand- 
mother who still dwelt there, had been married; 
that evening she sat there in her arm-chair of the 
style of the Dvzvectotre, singing to herself, and 
paying no heed to us. 

I remember this grandmother but vaguely, 
for she died but a short while after this. And as 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. ey, 





her living image will not come before us again in 
the course of these notes, I will devote a para- 
graph to her here. 

Long ago, it would seem, through many 
trials, she had been a brave and admirable 
mother. After such reverses as people experi- 
enced in those days, having lost her husband at 
the battle of Trafalgar and her eldest son in the 
wreck of the Medusa, she had resolutely set to 
work to bring up her second son— my father — 
till the time when he, in return could surround 
her with kindness and comfort. When she was 
nearly eighty years old—and she was not far 
from it when I was born—senile childishness 
had suddenly destroyed her intellect; I therefore, 
never knew her otherwise than bereft of ideas — 
her soul absent. She would stand for a long 
time in front of a certain mirror, conversing in 
the friendliest way with her own reflection which 
she addressed as “ my good neighbour,” or ‘my 
worthy friend.” But her chief craze was to sing 
with immense enthusiasm, the J/arsezllazse, the 
Parisienne, the Chant du Départ—all the great 


38 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





revolutionary hymns which, when she was young, 
had fired France; and yet, all through those 
stirring times she had kept very calm, thinking 
only of her household cares and of her boy — and 
it was all the more strange to hear this belated 
echo of the great upheaval aroused in her brain 
now that the dark mystery of final disorganization 
had begun in her. It always amused me to hear 
her; sometimes it made me laugh, but with no 
irreverent mockery; and she never frightened me ~ 
because she was still so pretty; — positively 
pretty, with fine, regular features, a very sweet 
look, beautiful hair hardly streaked with white, 
and in her cheeks that delicate dried-rose pink 
which the old people of her generation were 
privileged to preserve. There was I know not 
what atmosphere of modesty, reserve, and simple 
virtue about her still-neat little person, which I 
can see as I write — generally wrapped in a red 
cashmere shawl, and crowned with an old-world 
cap trimmed with large bows of green ribbon. 
Her room, where I loved to play because it 


was spacious and the sun shone in all the year 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE, 39 








round, was stamped with the simplicity of a 
country manse: furniture in black walnut wood 
from the time of the Dzrectotre, the huge bed 
hung with thick red cotton twill, the walls 
coloured with yellow ochre and graced with 
water-colour drawings of vases and bunches of 
flowers, in tarnished gilt frames. Ata very early 
age I fully appreciated how humble and old- 
fashioned the fittings of this room were; I even 
said to myself that this grandmamma must be 
much poorer than my other grandmamma, who 
was younger by twenty years, and always dressed 
in black, a much more imposing personage. 

Now, to return to my two compositions in 
black and white, the first certainly that I had 
ever committed to paper: the two ducks, oc- 
cupying such dissimilar social positions. 

For the Happy Duck I had sketched in the 
background a little house, and near the bird a 
sturdy female figure calling it to be fed. The 
Unhappy Duck, on the contrary, was all alone, 
swimming forlorn on a sort of dim ocean sug- 


gested by two or three parallel lines, and in the 


40 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








distance a deserted shore. The paper was thin, a 
sheet torn out of some book perhaps, and printed 
on one side; and the letters and lines showed 
through in grey spots which suddenly produced 
the effect to my eyes of clouds in the sky. The 
little scrawl, more formless than a_ school-boy’s 
smudge on the class-room wall, was strangely 
filled in by the stains in the background, and on 
a sudden assumed a terrible depth of meaning; 
in the growing twilight it spread like a vision ; 
hollows seemed to form in the distance, like the 
pale undulations of the sea. I was overwhelmed 
by my own work, finding in it things which I had 
certainly not put there, and which in fact I could 
scarcely know. ... 

“Oh Yh. L seried) sin: great’ excitement; to” miy 
little playfellow, who did not understand at all, 
“Oh! do you know—I cannot bear to look at 
it.’ And I hid the drawing under my fingers. 
But I came back to it again and looked at it, on 
the contrary, so attentively that to this day I can 
see it as I saw it then, transfigured: a gleam of 


light lay across the horizon of that ill-drawn sea, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 4I 





the rest of the sky was heavy with rain, and to 
me it represented a winter evening in a gale. 
The Unhappy Duck, alone, far from his family 
and friends, was making his way, no doubt to 
find shelter for the night, towards the hazy shore 
beyond, dark with desolate gloom. And I am 
quite sure that for a fleeting moment I had a 
complete foreknowledge of those heartachings 
which I was to know afterwards in the course of 
my seafaring life, when, in foul December weather, 
my barque should put in at dusk, for shelter till 
the morrow, in some uninhabited creek on the 
coast of Brittany; or—and yet more—=in the 
twilight of the southern winter, by the lands of 
Magellan, when we should seek a little protection 
for the night in those unknown regions—lands as 
inhospitable, as infinitely desert, as the ocean 
around them. 

When this sort of vision was past, I found my- 
self once more, in the great bare room shrouded in 
shade where my grandmother sat singing, a tiny 
creature who had seen nothing as yet of the wide 


world, frightened without knowing of what, and 


42 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





not even understanding how it was he had begun 
to cry. 

Since then I have noticed that the rudimen- 
tary scrawls done by children, with their crude, 
false colouring, may be more striking than clever 
or beautiful paintings, for the very reason that 
they are incomplete, and that as we look at them 
we are led to add our own ideas—a thousand 
things, surging up from the unsounded depths, 


which no brush could ever depict. 


X. 


UST above the poor old grandmother who 
sang the Marsezllaise, on the second floor, 
and on the side of the house which looked onto 
courtyards and gardens, dwelt my grand-aunt 
Bertha. From her windows, across some build- 
ings and low walls covered with roses and jas- 
mine, the ramparts of the town were visible at no 


great distance, with their ancestral trees, and 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 43 
beyond them a glimpse of the wide plains of our 
province prées as they are called (sea meadows) 
covered in summer by tall weeds and grass, and 
as monotonous and level as the sea itself. 

From up there the river, too, might be seen. 
At high tide, when it was full to the brim, it 
showed like a silver braid winding between the 
meadow-lands, and the boats, large and small, 
made their way in the distance along the narrow 
thread of water up to the port or down to the 
open. This was, in fact, the only view we had of 
the real country, and so my Aunt Bertha’s window 
had a particular attraction for me at a very tender 
age. In the evening especially, at the hour of 
sunset, when I could see from thence the orange 
disk so mysteriously swallowed up behind the 
fields. Oh! those sunsets, seen from Aunt 
Bertha’s windows; what rapture and what melan- 
choly they sometimes left in my mind ! — Winter 
sunsets, pale and rosy, through the closed pane — 
summer sunsets on stormy evenings blazing and 
gorgeous, which I could watch till the very end 


with every window open, breathing the odours of 


44 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





jasmine on the walls. Ah, no! there are no such 
sunsets now. When one promised to be es- 
pecially splendid or weird, if I were not there, 
Aunt Bertha, who never missed them, would 
hasten to call me: ‘ Little one, little one — come 
quick!” From one end of the house to the other 
I heard and understood her call; then I flew up 
as fast as I could pelt —all the faster because the 
staircase was beginning to be gloomy, and already 
at each turn I fancied imaginary forms of ghosts 
or monsters, who rarely failed to run after me up 
and down stairs at night, to my great terror. 
Aunt Bertha’s room, too, was humbly fur- 
nished, with white muslin curtains. The walls, 
papered with an old-fashioned hanging of the 
beginning of the century, were decorated with 
water-colours like grandmamma’s below. But 
what I chiefly gazed at was a picture in crayon, 
copied from Raphael, of a virgin draped in white, 
blue and rose-colour. The last sunbeams always 
lighted it up—and, as I have said, the sunset 
hour was the hour for that room. Now this 


virgin was like Aunt Bertha; in spite of the 





| 


a 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 45 
great difference in their ages the resemblance of 
the pure, regular lines of the two profiles was 
quite striking. 

On this same floor, but facing the street, my 
other grandmother lived; she who always wore 
black, with her daughter, my Aunt Claire, the 
person in all the house who did most to spoil me. 
I was in the habit, in the winter, of paying them 
a visit on leaving Aunt Bertha when the sun had 
gone to bed. In my grandmother’s room, where 
I generally found these two together, I sat down 
by the fire on a little chair placed there for my 
benefit, to spend the always anxious and alarm- 
ing hour of “blind man’s holiday.” After the 
movement and jumping of the day that dim hour 
almost always reduced me to stillness on this 
little chair, wide-eyed and uneasy, watching the 
slightest change in the outlines of the shadows, 
especially on the side where the door stood ajar 
to the darkening staircase. No doubt, if any one 
had known the melancholy and terrors which 
twilight brought me, the house would at once 


have been lighted to spare me; but no one 


46 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


understood it, and the persons about me, most of 
them advanced in life, were accustomed as dusk 
fell to remain quiet in their places for a long time 
‘without feeling the need of alamp. Asthe shades 
grew blacker one or another — grandmother or 
aunt—had to bring her chair forward, nearer, 
very near, that I might feel her protection close 
behind me; then, quite safe and happy, I would 
say: ‘‘ Now tell me a story of the Island.” 

“The Island” was the Island of Oleron, my 
mother’s birthplace and theirs, which they had all 
three left twenty years before I was born to settle 
here on the mainland. And the charm which that 
island, and the smallest things which had come 
from thence, always had for me, was very 
singular. 

We were not very far from it, for, from a 
certain dormer in our roof, it could be discerned 
in fine weather, far away beyond the level fields ; 
a low blue line raised above that paler narrow 
line which was the inlet dividing it from us. But 
to get there was quite a journey by reason of 


the wretched country coaches, and the sail-boats 





3 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 47 








in which we must cross, often in a stiff westerly 
breeze. At that time I had three old aunts 
living in the little town of Saint-Pierre d’Oleron, 
very quietly on the income from their salt 
marshes—the remains of scattered fortunes — 
and on the yearly dues paid them by the peas- 
antry in sacks of corn. When we went to see 
them at Saint-Pierre, it was joy for me, mingled 
with a variety of complicated emotions which I 
could not as yet unravel completely. The pre- 
dominant impression was that they themselves, 
their way of living, their house, their furniture, 
everything belonging to them, dated from a 
remote past, another century; and then there 
was the sea which I felt all round me, isolating 
us; the land even flatter and more wind-swept 
than at home; wide sands and endless shores. 

My nurse, too, was a native of Saint-Pierre, of 
a Huguenot family devoted to ours from father to 
son, ‘and she had a way of saying: ‘in the 
island”’ which infused into me, with a cold chill 
all her instinctive home-sickness. 


A quantity of little objects brought from “the 


48 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





island” and quite peculiar to it, had found a place 
in our house. First of all there were the large 
beach pebbles, picked out from the myriads on 
the ocean shore, rolled and ground for ages on 
the strand. These had a regular place in the 
domestic economy of the winter evenings; they 
were piled on the hearth where the great log-fires 
were blazing; then they were tied up in flowered 


chintz bags, from the island too, and placed in the 


beds where they kept the sleepers’ feet warm till ; 


morning. And in the garden cellar there were 
pitch-forks and huge jars; especially there were a 
number of tall straight poles of elm for hanging 
out the washing; these were young saplings 
chosen and cut in my grandmother’s wood. And 
all these things had a particular aroma of mystery 
to me. 

I knew that my grandmother owned those 
woods no longer, nor her salt marshes, nor her 
vineyards; I had heard that she had made up her 
mind to sell them by degrees and to invest her 
money on the mainland, and that a certain dis- 


honourable lawyer had by investing it badly 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 49 





reduced her possessions to a very small sum. So 
when I went to the island, and when certain old 
brine boilers, or old vine-dressers who had served 
the family, a faithful and submissive race, still 
called me “‘nxotre petit Lourgeots’’ (our little squire 
would represent the idea) it was out of pure 
politeness and the deference of remembrance. 
But I already regretted that past. A life spent 
in superintending vintages and crops, which had 
been that of many of my forefathers, seemed to 
me so much more desirable than my own, shut 
up in a town-house. 

The stories of the island, which my mother 
and my Aunt Claire used to tell me were stories 
of their childhood; and that childhood seemed to 
me so long, long ago, lost in ages which I could 
only conceive of as in the half-light of dreams. 
Grandparents always figured in them, grand-uncles 
whom I had never known, dead long years since, 
whose names I would have repeated, and whose 
aspect mystified and plunged me into endless 
dreaming. There was especially a certain uncle 


Samuel who had lived in the days of religious 


50 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








persecutions, and in whom I felt a very particular 
interest. 

I did not care for variety in these stories; 
often indeed I would ask for one which had cap- 
tivated me to be repeated. 

In general they were tales of travels — on the 
little donkeys which used to play so important a 
part in the lives of the good people who inhabited 


the island—to visit a distant vineyard or to 


cross the sands of the grande céte—the ocean 


shore; and then of some terrible storm in the 
evening of such an excursion, compelling them to 
take shelter for the night in an inn or a farm. 
And when my imagination was on the 
stretch towards all these bygone things, in the 
darkness which I had ceased to be aware of, 
“Ding-a-ding, ding-a-ding!” The dinner-bell. 
— I would jump up skipping for glee. We all 
went down together into the dining-room where 
I began by throwing myself against my mother 


and hiding my face in her dress. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 5I 





XI. 


ee eee: a stumpy, clumsy little dog, by 
no means a beauty, but whose whole soul 
beamed in two large eyes full of life and good- 
fellowship. I have quite forgotten how he came 
to have been made at home with us, but he spent 
some months with us, and I loved him dearly. 

Now one evening, during a winter’s walk, 
Gaspard had deserted me. I was comforted by 
being told that he would certainly find his way 
back by himself, and I came home in fairly good 
spirits. But when it became dusk my heart grew 
very full. 

My parents had to dine with them that even- 
ing a violin player of great talent, and I had been 
allowed to sit up late to hear him play. At the 
first strokes of his bow, as soon as he began to 
make some heart-broken adagio wail on the 
strings, it was to me as though he had evoked a 


vision of all the dark paths in the forest, of the 


52 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





black night in which creatures feel abandoned 
and lost; then I quite distinctly saw Gaspard 3 
wandering through the rain round a dismal spot — 
where several ways met, and, unable to find the ~ 
right one, set off towards some unknown point, ; 
never to return. — The tears came; and as no , 
one perceived them, the violin went on, casting 
its mournful appeals on the silence and finding — 
their response in the depths of the nether abyss, 
in visions which had no shape, no name, no — 
meaning. 

This was my first introduction to music, con- — 
juring up shades. After this years went by 
before I understood anything more about it, for — 
the little piano-forte pieces which I began to play — 
myself — “remarkably well for my age,” as I 
heard said—were as yet no more than a pleasant, 


measured sound to my ears. 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 53 








XII. 


HIS, now, is the story of an acute pain, pro- 
duced by a book which was read tome. I 
never read to myself and utterly disdained books. 
A very naughty little boy having left his 
family and his country, came back alone some 
years after when his parents and his sister were 
dead. This took place in November, of course, 
and the author described the grey sky and the 
wind which shook the last leaves off the trees. 

In the deserted garden, under an arbour of 
bare boughs the prodigal son, stooping to the 
dank earth, recognized among all these autumn 
leaves a blue bead left there from the time when 
he had come there to play with his sister. — But 
here I started up, and bid the reader cease, feel- 
ing the sobs rising. I had seen it, literally seen 
the lonely garden, the old arbour stripped of its 
greenery, and half-hidden among the withered 


leaves that blue bead, a relic of the lost sister. 


54 A CHILD’S ROMANCF. 








It all hurt me, fearfully, giving me a sense of the 
languishing end of existence, a feeling of the slow 
fading and dropping of everything. 

It is strange that a childhood so tenderly 
sheltered should have bequeathed me chiefly 
images of sorrow. 

Of course such sorrows were rare exceptions, 
and I usually lived in the gay heedlessness of all 
children; but no doubt these days of entire con- 
tentment, simply because they were the rule, left 
no trace in my brain and I find them no more. 

I have also a quantity of summer memories 
lying like broad flecks of sunshine above the con- 
fusion of remembrance crowded into my head. 
And always the great heat, the deep blue skies, 
the twinkling sparkles in our shore of sand, the 
reflected blaze of light from the white walls of the 
cottages in the little hamlets on “the island,” left 
an impression on my mind of melancholy and 
torpor such as I found again, only greatly inten- 


sified, in the lands of Islam. 





ee ee ee ee yee ee 


ee ee a 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 5 








ALLE, 


66 yo tae at midnight there was a cry made: 

‘Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye 
out to meet him.’ And the virgins which were 
ready went in with him to the marriage: and the 
door was shut. Then came also the foolish virgins 
saying: ‘Lord, Lord, open unto us!’ But he an- 
swered and said: ‘ Verily I say unto you, I know 
you not.’ Watch, therefore, for ye know neither 
the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man 
cometh.” 

After reading these verses aloud, my father 
closed the Bible; there was pushing of chairs in 
the drawing-room where we all were collected, in- 
cluding the servants, and every one knelt down 
to pray. This was the rule every evening, after 
the manner of the old Protestant families — just 
before separating for the night. 


“The door was shut.” I, on my knees, was 


56 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








not following the prayer, for the foolish virgins 
appeared to me. They were robed in white veils 
which floated behind them in their eager haste, and 
they had little lamps in their hands with quivering 
flames which immediately went out and left them 
in the outer darkness before that closed door, ir- 
revocably shut to all eternity. — Then a moment 
might come when it would be too late to entreat, 
when the Lord, weary of our sinning, would no 
longer hearken! I had never before thought of 
this as possible. And deep and gloomy fear, 
which nothing in my baby faith had ever caused 
me till this day, took possession of me at the 
notion of irrevocable damnation. 

For a long, long time, for weeks and months, 
the parable of the foolish virgins haunted my 
dreams. And every evening, as the dusk fell, I 
repeated to myself the no less awful than comfort- 
ing words: ‘ Watch therefore, for ye know neither 
the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man 
cometh.’ — “‘If he were to come to-night,” thought 
I, “if I were to be aroused by the noise of many 


waters, by the angel’s trump sounding the terrific 








A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 57 


signal for the end of the world.” And I could not 
go to sleep till I had said my prayers at great 
length and besought the mercy of the Lord. 

Nor do I believe that any small creature ever 
had a more timid conscience than I; over every 
little thing I was tormented with scruples which 
those who loved me best often failed to under- 
stand, and which made my heart very full. I re- 
member, for instance being miserable for days 
together out of some fear of having said some- 
thing, or told some tale which was not absolutely 
accurate. To such a point that almost always 
when I had told my story or made my statement 
I was heard to murmur in an undertone, as if I 
were telling my beads: ‘ After all, perhaps I do 
not exactly know how it all was.” Even now I 
look back with retrospective oppression on the 
thousand little fits of remorse and fear of sin 
which, from my sixth to my eighth year, cast a 
chill, a shadow, on my childhood. 

At that time if I ever was asked what I meant 
to be as I grew up, I unhesitatingly answered: 


‘““A minister,” and my religious vocation seemed 


58 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








great and genuine. Those about me would smile, 
no doubt thinking it well since I wished it. 

In the evening, and more especially at night, 
I was always thinking of that hereafter which I 
already knew by the awful name of Eternity. 
And my exit from this world—a world as yet 
scarce seen in one of its most colourless and for- 
gotten spots—seemed to me a very near thing. 
It was with mingled feelings of impatience and 
mortal terror that I pictured myself as very soon 
to wear a robe of shining white, in the glory of 
the Great Light, sitting with the throng of angels 
and the elect round ‘the Throne of the Lamb” 
in a vast unstable circle which would oscillate 
slowly but continuously, in vertiginous motion, to 


the sound of music in the infinite void of heaven. 


ALY, 


rT; NCE upon a time a little girl, opening a 

great big fruit from the colonies, there 
came out a beast —a green beast — which stung 
her — and she died of it.” 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 59 





It was my little friend Antoinette —she six 
and I seven — who told me this story, apropos to 
an apricot which we had just divided. 

We are sitting at the bottom of her garden, in 

the sweet month of June, under a thick apricot- 
tree, close together on one stool in a hut as big 
as a bee-hive, built with our own hands for our 
private accommodation, out of old planks, cov- 
ered with West Indian matting which had served 
to pack coffee imported from the Antilles. Tiny 
specks of sunlight peep through our roof of coarse 
woven reeds, and dance on our white pinafores 
and our faces, broken by the leaves of the trees 
which are stirred by a warm breeze. 

For at least two summers our favourite amuse- 
ment was building these Robinson Crusoe huts in 
corners which we fancied solitary, and sitting in 
them quite hidden to hold our chat. In the 
story of the little girl stung by a beast these 
words alone had plunged me at once into a 
reverie: ‘‘A great big fruit from the colonies.” 
And a vision had come to me of trees, and strange 


fruits, and forests peopled with wonderful birds. 


60 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


Ah! how full of emotion and magic to my 
childhood was that single word ‘the colonies,”’ 
which at that time meant to me the whole region 
of the distant tropics, with their palms, their huge 
flowers, their negroes, their animals, their adven- 
tures. From the confusion of my notions of 
these things arose a perfectly truthful feeling 
of them as a whole, an intuitive knowledge of 
their solemn splendour and enervating melan- 
choly. 

The palm-tree was recalled to me, I believe 
for the first time, by an engraving in a child’s 
book: Les Feunes Naturalistes by Madame Ulliac- 
Trémadeure, one of my New Year’s gifts out of 
which I loved to be read to in the evenings. 
Palms in hot-houses were as yet unknown in our 
little town. — The draughtsman had represented 
two of these unknown trees on a sea-shore, where 
some negroes were standing. Lately I had the 
curiosity to look again at this initiatory picture in 
the poor little book, its paper yellow with years 
and spotted with the damp of many winters; and 


I really wondered how it could have given rise to 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 61 





the very dimmest dream, unless my childish soul 
had been full of antecedent memories. 

The colonies! How can I express every- 
thing that tried to struggle into being in my 
brain at the mere ring of the word. A fruit from 
the colonies, a bird, a shell, were to me forthwith 
objects almost of enchantment. There were 
quantities of these colonial treasures at Antoin- 
ette’s home; a parrot, birds of all colours in a 
cage, collections of shells and insects. In her 
mother’s drawers I. had seen quaint strings of 
fragrant berries; and in the lofts where we would 
sometimes rummage together, we found the skins 
of beasts, queer bags, cases with the names of 
West Indian places still legible on them; and a 
vague exotic perfume pervaded the whole house. 
Her garden, as I have said was divided from ours 
by only a very low wall covered with roses and 
jasmine; and a pomegranate which grew there, a 
tall and venerable tree, threw its branches over our 
yard, and in the season shed its coral petals there. 

We would often talk, behind the scenes, from 


one house to the other: 


62 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

“May I go over and play with you, I say? 
Will your mamma let me ?” 

“No. I have been naughty, I am in dis- 
grace... .’’ This was very often the case. Then 
I felt greatly disappointed but less for her sake, I 
must own, than for the sake of the parrot and the 
foreign curiosities. 

She herself had been born there —in the 
colonies, this very little Antoinette, and — how 
strange it seemed,—she did not appear to under- 
stand the value of the privilege; she was not 
delighted, she could scarcely remember anything 
about it. But I—I would have given anything 
in the world if only once, for a moment, my eyes 
might have had the briefest glimpse of those 
lands, so far away, so inaccessible as I felt they 
were. And with almost an anguish of regret — 
the regret of a marmoset in its cage—I would 
reflect that alas! in all my life as a minister, how- 
ever long it might be, I should never see them, 


never. 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 63 





XV. 


WILL tell you the game which most amused 

Antoinette and me during those two de- 
licious summers. 

It was this: first we were caterpillars; we 
crawled on the ground, with difficulty, on our 
hands and stomachs, searching for leaves to eat. 
Then we made believe that invincible sleepiness 
numbed our senses, and we lay down in some 
corner under the boughs, covering our heads 
with our white pinafores; we were chrysalises in 
our cocoons. This state lasted a longer or 
shorter time, and we so fully entered into our 
part of insects undergoing metamorphosis that a 
listener might have overheard such phrases as 
these spoken in tones of entire conviction : 

“Do you think you will soon fly ?” 

“Oh, it will be very soon this time. I feel 
them on my shoulders —they are unfolding... .” 


They, of course, were wings. 


64 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





At last we woke up; stretched ourselves with 
airs and graces, not speaking a word, but as if we 
were amazed at the phenomenon of this final 
transformation. And then, suddenly, we began 
to run about, hither and thither, very lightly in 
our little thin shoes; with our hands we held the 
corners of our white pinnies, fluttering them to 
“make believe’? wings—and we ran and ran, 
flitting after each other or away again, across 
and across in sharp fantastic curves; close to 
every flower to smell it with the restless hurry 
of a butterfly, and making a buzzing noise, 
‘“Hooooo” with our lips nearly shut and our 


cheeks puffed out. 


XVI. 


oe ERP en Boor butterflies, they are 

out of fashion now-a-days — played a very 
great part in my life as a child, Iam ashamed to 
confess; with flies, beetles, dragon flies, all the 
creeping things of the grass and the flowers. 
Though I could not bear killing them I made 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 65 








collections of them, and I was always to be seen 
with a butterfly-net in my hand. Those which 
flitted into the back garden, excepting a stray 
specimen from the country now and then, were 
not, it must be owned, very handsome; but I 
had the garden and the woods of da Limozse 
which all the summer through were my happy 
hunting-grounds, full of surprises and marvels. 
However, Topffer’s caricatures gave me pause; 
and when Lucette meeting me with a butterfly 
stuck into my hat would put on her inimitable 
mocking face and call me ‘ Monsieur Crypto- 


game’”’ I was deeply humiliated. 


XVII. 


HE poor old grandmamma who sang songs 

was dying. 

We were standing round her bed, all of us, in 
the dusk of a spring day. She had not kept her 
bed more than eight-and-forty hours, but by 

5 


66 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





reason of her great age the doctor said it meant a 
speedy end. Her brain had suddenly become 
quite clear; she mistook none of our names; she 
called us, bid us stay, in a gentle deliberate voice 
—her voice in the past, no doubt, which I had 
never known. 

Standing by my father I gazed at my dying 
grandmother, and at the simple spacious room 
with its old-fashioned furniture. Above all I 
looked at the pictures on the walls, representing 
flowers in jars. 

Oh! Those water-colours on my grand- 
mother’s walls, poor little innocent things! They 
all had this superscription: ‘‘ Bouguet a ma 
mere’ and below a few respectful lines of poetry 
dedicated to her — four lines, which I now could 
read and understand. These were works of my 
father’s childhood and youth; for at every anni- 
versary of her birthday he had contributed such a 
work to decorate their unpretending home. Poor 
little innocent things! They bore witness to the 
modest existence of those bygone days, and the 


sacred intimacy of the mother and son in the old 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 67 





time, on the morrow of their great trials, of the 
fearful wars, of English invaders and fire-ships. 
For the first time it now struck me that my 
grandmother might once have been young; that 
no doubt, before her brain had gone wrong, my 
father had loved her as I loved my mother; that 
his grief at losing her would be very great. I 
pitied him, and was sorry for having laughed at 
her songs, for having laughed at her talk to her 
looking-glass. 

I was sent down stairs. On various pretexts 
I was kept out of the way all the evening without 
understanding why; then I was taken to our 
friends the D.’s, to dine with Lucette. 

But when my nurse fetched me home, at 
about half-past eight, I would go straight up to 
my grandmother. 

At the door I was at once struck by the 
perfect order which had been re-established, the 
atmosphere of profound peace which reigned in 
the room. In the shadows of the further side my 
father was sitting motionless by the head of the 
bed; the curtains hung straight and even, and on 


68 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 











the pillow, just in the middle, I discerned my 
grandmother’s face—dasleep. Her attitude had 
something indescribable about it, too straight — 
final as it were, eternal. 

Near the door my mother and sister’ were 
sewing at each side of a chiffonnier, in the place 
where they had sat ever since my grandmother 
had been taken ill. As I appeared they signed 
to me to be quiet: “Gently, gently; no noise; 
she is asleep.” The lamp shade threw a 
bright light on their work which was a mass 
of scraps of silk — green, brown, yellow, grey — 
among which I recognized pieces of their old 
dresses, or their old bonnet-ribbons. At the 
first moment, I fancied these must be some 
objects which it was customary to prepare thus 
for dying persons; but as I questioned them in a 
whisper they explained: these were simply scent- 
bags they were preparing, and going to sew for a 
charitable ball. 

I said that before going to bed I would go up 
to grandmother and try to bid her good-night, 
and they let me go a little way towards the bed; 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 69 


—__—_— - — 





but as I reached the middle of the room they 
suddenly thought better of it after exchanging 
glances: 

“No, no,” said they, still in a whisper, ‘‘Come 
away; you might disturb her.” 

But indeed, I had stopped of my own accord, 
startled and chilled —I had understood. 

In spite of the horror which rooted me to the 
spot I was surprised that my grandmother was 
not unpleasant to look at; never having seen any 
one dead before I had always imagined that, the 
soul once departed, there must be from the first 
moment a haggard expressionless grimace like a 
death’s-head. On the contrary, she had an 
infinitely sweet and happy smile; she was still 
pretty and looked young again — at perfect 
peace. 

Then there passed through me one of those 
little lightning-flashes such as often gleam in a 
child’s brain, as if to afford a furtive, questioning 
glance into uncertain depths; and I made this re- 
flection: How could my grandmother be in 


Heaven? How was I to understand this division 


70 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








of the person, since what is left to be buried 1s so 
entirely herself, preserving, alas! even her ex- 
pression ? 

So I stole away without asking any questions, 
my heart full and my soul distraught, not daring 
to hear the confirmation of what I had guessed so 
surely, and preferring not to hear the word which 
terrified me. 

For a long time little scent-bags were in- 


separable in my mind from the notion of death. 


SVT 


O this day there lurk in my memory certain 

painful impressions, almost distressing if I 
concentrate my mind on them, of a serious illness 
I had when I was about eight years old. It was 
called scarlet-fever I was told, and the name 
alone struck me as having something diabolical 
about it. 


It was in the bitter dismal season of March 


‘ 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 71 





squalls, and every evening at dusk, if my mother 
was by any chance not at my side, gloom fell on 
my soul. Oh! that twilight dejection which 
animals, and complicated creatures such as I, feel 
with almost equal intensity! My parted bed- 
curtains revealed in the foreground always the 
same depressing little table, with cups of ¢zsave, * 
and phials of medicine. And as I lay gazing at : 
this sick-room apparatus — growing more and 
more dim and vague and weird against the back- 
ground of the darkening silent room — my head 
was filled with a procession of disconnected 
images, morbid and alarming. For two _ suc- 
cessive evenings I was visited in the half-light, in 
my feverish doze, by two different persons who 
filled me with terror. 

First came an old lady humpbacked and very 
ugly, with an insinuating ugliness, who came up 
to me without a sound, without my hearing the 
door open or seeing the nurse who sat with me 


rise to receive her. She went away at once 


* Cooling drinks prepared from violets, marshmallow, or other 
herbs. 


72 | A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





without even speaking to me; but as she turned 
her back I saw her hump, and there was an 
opening at the top of it out of which perked the 
green head of a parrot the old lady had inside 
her, which said Cuckoo! in a little squeak like a 
speaking doll a long way off and then vanished 
again into that terrible back. — Oh! as I heard 
that Cuckoo! my forehead was damp with cold 
dews; but it was all gone, and I understood at 
once that it was but a dream. 

The next night a man came, tall and lean, in 
a black gown like a priest. He did not come 
near; but he wandered round and round the 
room, quite close to the wall; very fast but 
making no sound, he was very much bent and 
his horrid legs, like sticks stuck his gown out 
stiffly ashe hurried by. And—terror of terrors — 
his head was the great, white skull of a bird with a 
long bill—the monstrous and magnified image of 
a sea-mew’s skull, bleached by the spray, which I 
had picked up the summer before on the beach 
of the island. — I believe this gentleman’s visit 


coincided with the day when I was at the worst, 





A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 7 





even in some little danger. After a few rounds, 
always in the same hurry and the same silence, 
he rose from the floor still making play with his 
lean legs—higher, higher—on the cornice, the 
pictures, the mirrors—till he vanished in the 
ceiling, now quite dark. 

Well, for two or three years the image of 
these two figures haunted me. In winter even- 
ings I remembered them with alarm as I went up 
the stairs, which it was not yet usual to light up. 
“Supposing they should be there,’ I would say 
to myself; “supposing they were watching for 
me behind the doors so suspiciously ajar, either 
of them were to pursue me; supposing they 
should come up behind me, stretching out their 
hands from step to step to clutch my legs!” 

And [I declare I am not sure whether by the 
humouring of my fancy a little, I might not at 
this very day feel uneasy on those stairs about 
that old lady and gentleman, they were for so 
long the crowning features of my childish terrors, 
and so long headed the processions of my visions 


and bad dreams. 


74 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

Many another gloomy apparition haunted the 
early years of my life, though it was so excep- 
tionally happy. Many a sinister reverie would 
come upon me in the twilight; of a night with no 
morrow, of a short future with nothing beyond; 
thoughts of an early death. Too much petted 
and sheltered in a sort of intellectual hothouse, 
I displayed, as it were, an etiolated growth and 
the limp langour of a plant which lacks air. 
What I wanted was companions of my own age, 
rough, noisy little brutes of boys; instead of this. 
I now and then played with only little girls, and 
was always prim and neat, my hair curled and 
my manners those of a little marquis of the 
XVIII century. 


XIX. 


FTER this long fever, with its malignant 
name, I remember with rapture the day 


when at last I was allowed to breathe the outer air, 





A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 75 


to go down into my garden. It was now April, 
and they had chosen a brilliant day for my first 
outing, with a glorious sky. Under the trellices of 
jasmine and honeysuckle I felt the enchantment 
of Paradise, of Eden. Everything had sprouted 
and blossomed; without my knowing it, while I 
was shut up, the lovely mse en scéne of revival 
had unfolded on the earth. This perennial phan- 
tasmagoria, which has soothed the soul of man for 
sO many ages, and which only the very old ever 
cease to enjoy, had not yet very often beguiled 
me; and I gave myself up to it with perfect in- 
toxication. Oh! that pure air, mild and balmy; 
that daylight, that sunshine; the lovely green of 
the young plants, the crowded leaves casting a 
new shade! And within me, reviving strength, 
and the joy of breathing, and the deep spring of 
life beginning once more. 

My brother was at this time a tall fellow of 
twenty-one, who was free to do as he list. All 
the time I was ill I had been much excited over 
something he was doing in the garden and which 


I was dying to see. It was a miniature tank in a 


76 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





sweet nook under an old plum-tree; he had had 
it dug out and cemented like a reservoir; then he 
had had irregular stones brought in from the 
open heath, and turfs of moss, to build up a ro- 
mantic edging of rock and grotto. And now it 
was all finished; gold fish were already swimming 
in it, and the little fountain was made to play for 
the first time in my honour. 

I was quite enchanted; it was beyond every 
thing my imagination could have conceived of as 
most delightful. And when my brother told me 
that it was for me, that he gave it me for my 
own, I felt a depth of joy which it seemed to me 
must last for ever. To possess all this! What 
unlooked-for happiness! To rejoice in it every 
day, day after day, during the fine hot months 
that were coming. And to live out of doors 
again, to play as I had done last summer in every 
corner of the place thus beautified. 

I stayed a long time by the side of my pond, 
never tired of looking, admiring, breathing the 
soft spring air; elated with the broad daylight 
{I had forgotten and the sunshine I had 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 77 





found again; while over my head the old tree, 
planted long ago by some ancestor and already 
somewhat dry, spread its pierced screen of young 
leaves against the blue sky, and the tiny fountain 
went on with its purling tinkle in the shade like a 
little hurdy-gurdy singing with glee at my re- 
turn to life. 

Now-a-days the poor plum-tree, after lan- 
guishing with old age is quite dead, and the 
stump, which is all that is left standing, cherished 
out of respect, is crowned like a ruin with a 
clump of ivy. But the pond with its banks and 
islets remains untouched; time has only given it 
an appearance of genuineness. ‘The moss-grown 
stones pretend to be very ancient indeed; real 
water weeds, the tender growths of springs, have 
made themselves at home there, with rushes and 
wild iris ; and dragon-flies that have wandered into 
the town take refuge there. It is a tiny plot of 
uncultured nature which has established itself 
there, and which is never disturbed. 

And to me it is the spot of earth to which I 


am most fondly attached, after having loved 


78 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








many others; there I am at peace as I am no- 
where else; there I find refreshment, the renewal 
of youth and of life. My Mecca, my holy place, 
is that little plot; so much so that if it were 
altered I feel that something in my life would 
have lost its balance, I should miss my foothold 
— it would be the beginning of the end. 

The absolute consecration of the place arose, 
I fancy, from my seafaring life; my long voyages, 
and frequent exiles during which I always — 
thought of it and pictured it with affection. 

To one of these miniature grottoes I especially 
cling with peculiar devotion. I so often dreamed 
of it in hours of dejection and melancholy in the 
course of my wanderings. After the breath of 
Azrael had so cruelly passed over us, after mis- 
fortunes of every kind, after so many years dur- 
ing which I tossed about the world while my 
widowed mother and my aunt Claire, two black 
figures, were left alone in the dear old house, now 
almost empty and as still as the tomb — in those 
long years, more than once I had felt a chill 
about my heart as I thought that the deserted 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 79 








hearth and all the places dear to my childhood 
were -no doubt falling into neglected decay; but 
above all I longed to know whether the hand of 
time and the winter rains had destroyed the 
slight roof of that little grotto. It is a strange 
thing to say, but if those mimic rocks, old and 
moss-grown, had fallen in, I should have felt al- 
most as if an irremediable fissure had been 
made in my life. 

By the side of the little pool an old grey wall 
forms part of what I have called my Mecca; it is, 
I might almost say, the very heart of it. J know 
its minutest details; the microscopic lichens 
which grow there, and the rifts made by time 
where spiders are at home; for an arbour of ivy 
and honeysuckle crows up against it in whose 
shade I was wont to settle myself to my tasks in 
the finest summer days, and then, during my 
idling as a not very studious school-boy, its grey 
stones absorbed my whole attention with their in- 
finitely little world of insects and mosses. Not 
only do I love and venerate this old wall, as the 


Arabs do their holiest mosque, but I fancy it pro- 


80 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


tects me, secures my life, and prolongs my youth. 
I would not suffer the smallest change to be 
made in it, and if it were taken down I should 
feel it as the destruction of a mainstay which 
nothing could ever replace. This is no doubt 
because the mere continuance of certain things 
which we have known all our lives, beguiles us at 
last as to Our own permanence, our own contin- 
uance ; seeing them unchanged, we fancy that we 
cannot change either, nor cease to be. I find no 
other explanation of this feeling which is almost 
fetichism. 

And yet, good Heavens! when I reflect — 
these stones are, after all, any stones; brought 
together like those of any wall, by workmen, no 
matter who, a century perhaps before I was born 
—then I feel how childish is the illusion I in- 
dulge in spite of myself, that they have any pro- 
tecting charm; on how instable a foundation — 
an airy nothing — I dream that my life depends. 

Men who have never had a paternal home, 
who, while still young, have gone from place to 


place and lived under hired roofs, can obviously 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 81 











understand nothing of these feelings. But among 
those who have preserved the family hearth there 
must, I am sure, be many who, without owning it 
to themselves, are conscious of similar impres- 
sions in various degrees. Like me they store up 
their own evanescence on the relative antiquity of 
an old garden wall loved in childhood, an old 
terrace they have always known, an old tree un- 
changed in growth. 

And to others alas! before them, the same 
things perhaps had afforded their illusory proba- 
tion, to unknown predecessors, now mingling 
with the dust, and who were not even of their 


blood or of their race. 


XX. 


T was after this illness, about the middle of 
that summer, that I paid my longest visit to 
the island. I was sent thither with my brother, 


and with my sister who was like a second mother 
6 


82 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





tome. After spending a few days with our rela- 
tions at Saint-Pierre d’Oleron — my grand-aunt 
Claire and the two old maids her daughters — we 
three went to live together on the Grand’- Cote — 
the ocean coast — in a fishing village, then per- 
fectly unknown and remote from outer ken. 

The Grand’- Cote or Cote-Sauvage is the side of 
the island which overlooks the infinite ocean hor- 
izon; which is perennially swept by the westerly 
gale. The strand stretches without a curve, 
straight and endless, and the breakers come in 
unchecked till they reach the shore, as majestic 
as on the coast of Sahara, and curl over in melan- 
choly mile-long rollers of white surf, with a loud 
unceasing noise. A stern region with desert 
spaces; a region of sand where stunted trees, 
dwarf evergreen oaks, cower under shelter of the 
sand-hills. A quite peculiar flora, and all through 
the summer a profusion of fragrant little pinks. 
Only two or three villages with the wilderness 
between; hamlets of low houses, as white with 
lime-wash as the Algerian kasbahs, and sur- 


rounded by plots of such flowers as can withstand 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 83 





the salt breeze. They are inhabited by tanned 
fisher-folk, a brave and honest race, and still very 
primitive at the time of which I write, for no 
bathers had ever invaded these shores. 

In an old, forgotten note-book in which my 
sister had written her impressions of that summer 
—they might have been my own—lI find this 
description of our lodgings: 


We were in the middle of the village at the house 
of Monsieur the Mayor. For Monsieur the Mayor’s 
house had two wings of considerable extent. 

It blazed in the sunshine, quite dazzling with lme- 
wash; its ponderous shutters, fastened with strong iron 
hooks, were painted dark green, after the fashion of the 
island. A garden plot was enclosed, like a garland 
round the house, and the flowers throve bravely in the 
sand: Marvel of Peru, its pretty branches of yellow, 
pink or crimson flowers rising from a tangle of mig- 
nonette, opened at noon with a faint scent of orange 
blossom. 

Opposite, a little sandy cut went steeply down to 
the strand. 


It is from this stay on the open coast that I 


date my first really intimate acquaintance with 


84 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





ae 


wrack, and crabs, and sea anemonies, and all the 
thousand treasures of the shore. 

That summer, too, I first fell in love — with a 
little girl in the village. But here again, that the 
tale may be more true, I will allow my sister to 


speak, and copy from the old note-book: 


The fisher folks’ children would come out in 
dozens, brown and tanned, trotting along with their 
little bare feet, following Pierre, or boldly getting in 
front of him and looking back from time to time, 
opening their fine black eyes very wide. In those days 
a little gentleman was a sight so rare in that part of the 
world as to be well worth running after. 

Down the sandy hollow-way Pierre went to shore 
every morning, surrounded by this escort. He would 
rush on the shells, which are exquisite on this tract of 
sand; yellow, pink and violet—of every fresh and 
delicate hue and the most delicate shapes. He would 
find some that were a perfect delight to him, and the 
little ones in utter silence would fill their hands with 
them, too, and follow him, never saying a word. 

One of the most constant was Véronique — about 
his own age, perhaps a little younger, six or seven. 
She had a sweet, dreamy little face, dark and pale, 
with lively: grey eyes; all hooded in a deep white 
kichenote — an old local name for a sun bonnet, an 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 85 








—_——. 


ancient head-dress of the women of the coast. 
Véronique would creep close up to Pierre and at last 
take possession of his hand, and would not leave go 
again. They trotted on as two babies do which have 
taken a fancy for each other, saying nothing, but look- 
ing at each other from time to time — then a kiss now 
and then. Voudris ben vous biser—1 should like to 
kiss you,she would say, putting out her little arms with 
touching affection; and Pierre let her give him a kiss, 
and returned it warmly on her nice, round little cheeks. 

Véronique ran off to sit down on our door step 
every morning as soon as she was up; she huddled 
down like a little dog and waited. Pierre, as soon as 
he woke felt sure she was there, and for her he would 
be up quite early; he must be washed and his yellow 
hair combed — quick, very quick, and off he went to 
find his little frend. They hugged and then talked 
over all they had found the day before; sometimes 
Véronique, before coming to her seat, had already been 
down to the shore and gathered fresh treasures hidden 
in her pinafore. 

One day, towards the end of August, after long 
musing, weighing, no doubt, and settling all the diff- 
culties which might arise from differences of social 
status, Pierre said: ‘‘ Véronique, we will be married; 
I will ask leave of Papa and Mamma.” 


My sister goes on to give this account of our 


departure: 


86 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


On the 15th of September we had to leave. Pierre 
had made piles of shells, seaweeds, starfish, pebbles ; 
insatiable, he wanted to bring everything away, and 
packed it all into boxes; he and Véronique, who 
helped him with all her might. 

One morning a large carriage came from Saint- 
Pierre to fetch us away, rousing the peaceful village by 
the tinkling of bells and the smacking of the whip. 
Pierre anxiously saw all his personal belongings stowed 
in it, and we all three got in; his eyes already full of 
grief looked down the hollow cut to the sands — and 
at his little friend who was sobbing. 


And to end I will transcribe, again word for 
word, this reflection of my sister’s, written in that 
same summer, at the end of the note-book, and 


faded by years: 


Then there came over me — and not for the first 
time — an uneasy wondering as I looked at Pierre. I 
asked myself: “What will that child be ? — And what 
his little friend, whose outline is to be seen still stand- 
ing at the end of the road? What despair is racking 
that tiny heart; what anguish at finding herself thus 
deserted.” 


“What will that child be?’ Good God! 


nothing but just what he was at that very day; in 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 87 





the after years nothing more, and nothing less. 
Departures like that one; busy packing of a 
thousand treasures of no appreciable value; the 
craving to carry everything away, to bear abouta 
whole world of souvenirs—and above all adieux 
to those little untamed creatures, loved just be- 
cause they were so—: this is the epitome of my 
whole life. 

The two or three days of our return jour- 
ney, including a pause to see our old island 
aunts, seemed to me infinitely long. My im- 
patience to see my mother once more deprived 
me of sleep. More than two months without 
seeing her! My sister in those days was the only 
person in the world who could have enabled me 
to endure so long a separation. 

When we were on the mainland once more, 
after three hours drive from the shore where a 
boat deposited us, when the carriage conveying us 
had passed the ramparts of the town —at last I 
saw my mother waiting for us, her eyes, her sweet 
smile. — And in the distant past one of the dear- 


est indelible images I can always recall is her dear 


88 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





face, still almost young, and her dear hair still 
black. 

As soon as I got home I ran to see my little 
lake and grottoes, and the arbour behind, against 
the old wall. But my eyes had slowly become 
accustomed to the immense stretches of seashore ; 
everything looked shrunk, diminished, shut in, 
melancholy. And the leaves were turning yellow ; 
there was an indefinable touch of early autumn 
in the air, and yet very hot. I thought with 
dread of the dark cold days to come, and very 
sadly set to work in the court-yard to unpack my 
boxes of sea-weeds or shells, full of stricken 
regret at no longer being in the island. I was 
uneasy, too, about Véronique, and what she would 
do all alone during the winter; suddenly I was 
moved to tears at the remembrance of her poor 
little sunburnt hand which would never again rest 


in mine. 





* 
> 
| 
j 


aw 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 89 


XXI. 


HE beginning of tasks, lessons, copy-books, 
ink-spots — what a sudden dreariness in my 
story. Of all that I have none but sullen recol- 
lections, mortally wearisome. And if I dared to 
be quite sincere, I might say the same I believe of 
my teachers themselves. Oh! Heavens! The 
first who taught me Latin —vrosa, a rose, cornu, 
the horn, Zovztru, the thunder —a tall old man, 
bent, unwashed, and dismal to behold as rain in 
November! He is dead, poor fellow, peace be to 
his soul; he was a realization of Topffer’s ‘‘ Mon- 
sieur Ratin’’ —in every detail, to the wart with 
three hairs at the end of his old nose which dis- 
played an inconceivable complication of wrinkles. 
He was to me the personification of all that was 
disgusting and repulsive. 
Every day he came precisely at noon; his pull - 
of the bell chilled my blood; I should have 


known it among a thousand. After his departure 


go A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








I myself purified that part of my table where his 
elbows had rested, wiping it with napkins which I 
clandestinely carried off to the dirty linen room. 
And this aversion extended even to the books — 
in themselves not attractive— which he had 
touched; I tore out some pages which I suspected 
of having been too long in contact with his 
hands. | 

My books were always full of blots, always 
soiled, untidy, covered with scrawls and scribbling 
such as the pen will execute when the mind is 
wandering. I, such a neat and careful child in all 
else, had such a contempt for these books I was 
condemned to read that, with regard to them, I was 
vulgar and ill-behaved. And moreover — which 
is stranger still, my conscience was nowhere with 
regard to my tasks; they were always done at the 
last moment, anyhow; my aversion for study was 
the first thing which tempted me to compromise 
my scruples. 

However, everything went on well, more or 
less; my lessons, at which I glanced at the last 


extremity, were pretty well learnt. Andasa rule 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. gt 
“Monsieur Ratin” wrote good or pretty good on 
the mark-book which I had to show to my father 
every evening. 

But I really believe that if he, or the other tutors 
who came after him, could have suspected the 
truth, could have imagined that, once out of their 
sight, my mind never dwelt for five minutes in the 
day perhaps on the things they taught me, the 
indignation of their honest souls must have found 


utterance. 


XXII. 


N the course of the winter after my return from 

the coast of the island a great event took 

place in our family life, the departure of my 
brother for his first campaign. 

He was, as I have said, my elder by 
about fourteen years. Perhaps I had not had 
time enough to know him well, to become 
really attached to him, for he began to lead 
the life of a young man very early, and this 


separated us. I never went into his room, where 


92 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


the number of big books spread about the table 
and the smell of his cigars appalled me, and I ran 
the risk of meeting his companions, officers or 
students. I heard, too, that he was not always 
good, that he sometimes stayed out late at night, 
and had in consequence to be lectured, and 
secretly I disapproved of his coriduct. 

But his approaching departure increased my 
affection for him, and I was really sorry. 

He was going to Polynesia, to Tahiti, to the 
very end of the world, the opposite side of the 
globe, and he was to be away for four years, which 
represented about half my life and seemed to me 
almost an indefinite absence. 

I took a particular interest in the preparations 
for this long campaign: the iron-bound cases 
which. were packed with such care; the gold braid 
and embroideries, his sword, which was shrouded 
with tissue paper and buried like a mummy in a 
tin case, all this increased the impressions I had 
formed of the danger and distance of his long 
voyage. 


Moreover, a weight of melancholy hung over 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 93 


the whole household and became heavier and 
heavier as the day of separation approached. 
Our meals were eaten in silence, excepting now 
and then a piece of advice was given, and I 
listened thoughtfully and said nothing. 

The evening before he left, he amused himself, 
and greatly honored me—by confiding to my 
care various little fragile knick-knacks on his 
mantel-piece, begging me to see they were not 
damaged in his absence. 

Then he made me a present of a large book 
with a gilt cover which was called Zvavels in 
Polynesia, full of pictures; and this was the only 
book I loved as a little child. I turned over the 
pages at once with eager curiosity. At the 
beginning, a large picture represented a rather 
pretty woman, with brown complexion, crowned 
with grasses and lounging under a palm-tree, and 
underneath was written: ‘Portrait of H. M. 
Pomaré IV, Queen of Tahiti.” Further on were 
two beautiful creatures on the seashore, with bare 
bosoms and heads crowned with flowers, with the 


inscription: ‘‘Tahitian girls on the beach.” 


94 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





The last hour on the day he left, the prepara- 
tions being finished and the big boxes locked, we 
assembled in the drawing-room in solemn silence. 
A chapter of the Bible was read and then family 
prayers... Four years.! and soon the width of 
the world between us and him. 

I remember particularly my mother’s face 
during this farewell scene; seated in an arm-chair 
with him beside her, she kept at first after prayers 
an infinitely sad smile, an expression of resigned 
confidence, but suddenly a change I had not 
expected came over her features and she burst 
into tears. I had never before seen her cry and 
was terribly distressed. 

The first days which followed I was oppressed 
with the void he had ieft; from time to time I 
looked into his empty room, and as for the 
different little things he had either given or 
confided to me, they became most sacred relics. 

I was shown ona map of the world his passage 
which would take about five months. As for his 
return, I only saw it in an unimaginable and unreal 


future; and, strangely enough, what most spoiled 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 95 





the prospect of his return, was the fact that I 
should be‘twelve or thirteen years old, quite a big 
boy when I saw him again. 

Unlike all other children, especially those of 
the present day— who are in such a hurry to 
become little men and women —I had even then 
that horror of growing up, which became more 
marked later on; I used even to talk and write 
about it, but when asked why, I could only reply, 
not knowing better how to explain it: “I think I 
shall be so bored when I am grown up!” I 
believe it is a very singular case, unique perhaps, 
this dread of life, from its commencement: I 
could not clearly see the horizon, I could not give 
any shape, however vague, to the future; before 
me everything was impenetrably black, a leaden 


curtain was spread over the darkness. 


XXIII. 


<< “(Dugnieaiat cakes, beautiful cakes, all hot!” 
Thus sang to a plaintive air composed by 


herself, the old woman who sold them, and who 


96 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








for the first ten or fifteen years of my life, passed 
regularly under our windows on winter evenings. 

Whenever I think of those evenings, that 
melancholy little ditty sung behind the scenes, 
rushes into my mind. 

It is more particularly in connection with 
Sundays that the song of cakes all hot presents 
itself; for those evenings, having no tasks to do, I 
spent with my parents in the drawing-room on 
the ground-floor, which looked into the street, so 
when, at nine o’clock, the little old woman passed 
by, her sonorous chant echoing in the silent frosty 
night, I was there close enough to hear. 

She foretold the cold in the same way that the 
swallows announce the spring; after the chill 
autumn, the first time we heard her song, we said: 
‘Now winter has come.” 

In those evenings, the drawing-room, as I 
knew it then, was large, and to me appeared 
immense. Very simple, but arranged with a good 
deal of taste: the walls and woodwork colored 
brown with a dull gold beading, furniture up- 


holstered in red velvet, which must have dated 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 97 





eo 


from the time of Louis-Philippe; the family 
portraits in stiff black and gold frames. Severe 
bronze ornaments on the chimney-piece; and on 
the middle table, in the place of honour, a large 
XVIth century Bible, a venerable relic of the 
Huguenot ancestors who were persecuted for the 
faith; and flowers, always baskets and vases of 
flowers at a time when these things were not yet 
the fashion as they are now. 

After dinner, it was a delicious moment when 
we came in there out of the dining-room; every~ 
thing had such a comfortable peaceful air; and 
when all the family were seated, grandmother 
and aunts in a circle, I began gamboling in the 
middle onthe red carpet for mere joy at being in 
the midst of them, and in longing impatiently for 
the little games that would be played for my sake 
in a few minutes. Our neighbors the D***s, 
passed every Sunday evening with us; it was 
a family tradition, one of those time-honoured 
provincial friendships which have existed for gen- 
erations and are handed down with the heir- 


looms. 7 


98 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


= —_—_—— = — —__— ——_— 





Towards eight o’clock, when I heard their 
well-known ring, I jumped for joy, and nothing 
could have prevented my rushing to the front 
door to receive them, and in particular my great 
friend Lucette, who, of course, came with her 
parents. 

Alas! how sadly I now review those loved 
or venerated forms, God bless them!—who used 
to surround me on Sunday evenings; most of 
them have disappeared, and their faces, that I | 
would fain remember, fade in spite of me, become 
hazy and disappear too.... 

Well, we began the games, to please me, the 
only child present; we played at marriage, my 
lady’s toilet, the horned lady, the beautiful shep- 
herdess, blind-man’s buff, everybody taking part, 
even the most elderly; Grand-aunt Bertha, the 
oldest member and quite the funniest. 

And all of a sudden I stopped short, listening 
attentively as in the distance I heard: — Cakes, 
cakes, beautiful cakes, all hot! 

It came closer and closer, for the singer ran, 


steadily but quickly; quite soon she was under 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 99 








our windows, repeating the same song in her high 
cracked voice. 

And it was one of my great amusements, not to 
get some one to buy me some of those poor cakes— 
for they were rather heavy and I did not much 
care for them —but to run myself, when I was 
allowed, to the front door, accompanied by a 
willing aunt to stop the cake woman. 

With a curtsey she would come up, good old 
soul, proud at being called, and put her basket 
down on the steps; her clean costume was fin- 
ished off with white linen over-sleeves. Then, 
while she uncovered her wares, I, like a caged 
bird, cast a longing look outside into the cold 
deserted street. There was the whole charm; a 
breath of freezing air, a glance into the black 
darkness, and then to rush back into the warm 
and comfortable drawing-room — while the mo- — 
notonous refrain grew fainter and fainter and then 
died away, every evening in the same direction, 
through the same squalid streets, in the neighbour- 
hood of the port and the ramparts. Her road 


was always the same, — and my thoughts followed 


100 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 











—_—__——— 


her with a singular interest as long as her song, 
which she repeated from minute to minute, could 
be heard at all. | 

This attention was mingled with pity for the 
poor old woman who took this nightly walk, — 
but there was another sentiment mixed with it, — 
oh! so confused and vague that I may seem to 
give it too much importance, even in slightly 
sketching it. I had a queer curiosity to know 
more about those low quarters of the town, to 
which the cake-seller went so bravely, and where 
I was never taken. Old streets seen from a dis- 
tance, deserted by day, but where from time 
immemorial the sailors had a riotous time on féte- 
day evenings, the noise of their songs sometimes 
reaching us. What went on there? What were 
the brutal games of which we heard the cries? 
What did they play at, those folks returned from 
sea, or from far tropical lands? What a rough, 
simple and free life was theirs? — To put all this 
in the right focus, you must dilute it, or wrap it, 
so to speak, in a white veil. Already I felt the 


germ of a trouble, an aspiration towards an un- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE, , TOI 


= - a_,-£ = wate 





known something, and on returning to the draw- 
ing-room, where they sat quietly talking, for an 
instant, hardly appreciable, it seemed to me, I was 
a prisoner in a hot-house. 

At half-past nine, rarely later on my account, 
tea was brought in, with thin slices of bread and 
butter, —such delicious butter, and cut with a 
nicety that there is never time to give to anything 
in these days. Then about eleven, after a chapter 
from the Bible and prayers, we went to bed. 

In my little white bed, I was more fidgety on 
Sunday evenings than any other. First there was 
the prospect of M. Ratin’s return, more painful to 
contemplate after the respite ; then I regretted that 
this day of rest was already over, so quickly past, 
and I hated to think of the lessons to be done 
every day for a whole week before Sunday could 
come again. Sometimes, too, in the distance, 
some sailors would pass singing, and thus change 
the current of my ideas; and I thought of the 
colonies, and ships, and I had a sort of dim inex- 
plicable longing — latent, if I may use the word — 


to rush in search of adventure and amusement, 


02 A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 


i, — a i ————$ 





out into the keen night air of winter, or into the 
blazing sunshine of tropical ports; and sing, at 
the top of my voice as they did, the simple joy of 


being alive. 


XXIV. 


“AND I beheld, and heard an angel flying 

through the midst of heaven, saying with 
a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of 
the earth /” 

Besides the reading in the family circle every 
evening, | read a chapter of the Bible every 
morning in bed. 

My Bible was a little one with small print. 
Between the pages I had pressed some treasured 
dried flowers; one particular branch of beautiful 
pink larkspur had the gift of clearly bringing to 
my recollection the stubblefield* on the isle of 
Oleron, where I had gathered it. 

The “stubble” of the island, inhabited by 


* Gleux. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 103 





swarms of grasshoppers, is covered with a late 
crop of tall blue cornflowers, and above all, of 
larkspurs, white, violet or pink. 

So on winter mornings in bed, before begin- 
ning my reading I always looked at this branch 
of flowers, whose colour was hardly faded, and it 
brought back to me the fields of Oleron and the 
blazing summer sunshine. . 

“And I beheld, and heard an angel flying 
through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud 
voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the 
earth /” 

“And the fifth angel sounded, and [ saw a star 
fall from heaven unto the earth, and to him was 
given the key of the bottomless pit.” 

When I read my Bible alone and could choose 
the passage, I always selected the grand account 
in Genesis of the creation of light from darkness, 
or else the marvellous visions in the Apocalypse ; 
I was fascinated by the poetry of these dreams of 
terror, which have no equal, to my knowledge, in 
any human book—the beast with seven heads, 


the signs in heaven, the sound of the last trumpet, 


104 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

these terrors I knew so well, haunted and charmed 
my imagination. — There was a book of the last 
century, a relic of my Huguenot ancestors in 
which I saw these things depicted: a History of 
the Bible with quaint apocalyptic pictures where 
all in the distance was black. My maternal 
grandmother treasured, in a cupboard in her 
room, this precious volume which she had brought 
from the isle, and as I was in the habit of repair- 
ing thither in a melancholy mood in the winter 
when it began to be dusk, it was nearly always 
when the light was failing that I asked her lend it 
me, and on her knees, until it was too dark to see, 
I turned the yellow pages and looked at the 
flights of angels with their large strong wings, the 
black curtains, foreboding the end’ of the world, 
the sky darker than the earth, and in the midst of 
the banks of clouds, the simple and terrible 
triangle signifying Jehovah. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 105 








XXV. 


GYPT, Ancient Egypt especially, a little later 

on, exercised a weird fascination over me, I 
recognized it for the first time, without astonish- 
ment or hesitation in an engraving in an illus- 
trated magazine. I greeted as old acquaintances, 
two gods with hawks-heads whom I met there, 
depicted in profile on a stone, one on each side of 
a strange zodiac, and though the day was dark, 
they brought I am sure, an immediate impression 


of, heat and sunshine. 


XXVI. 


FTER my brother was gone, during the fol- 
lowing winter, I spent many of my play- 
hours in his room, painting the prints in the book 


of Voyages in Polynesia which he had given me. 


106 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





First I coloured the flowers and the birds with 
extreme care. Then it was the turn of the men. 
As to the “ Young Girls of Tahiti on the sea- 
shore,” which the designer had drawn from some 
imaginary nymphs, I made them white — oh as 
white and pink as the sweetest dolls. And I 
thought them quite bewitching. The future had 
it in store to show me that they were of a different 
hue, and that their charm is of another kind. 

But, indeed, all my notions of beauty have 
changed greatly since then, and I should have 
been much amazed if I had been told what kinds 
of faces I should have come to think charming in 
the unforeseen sequel. All children have the 
same ideal on that point, which varies as they 
grow to be men. They, in their simplicity and 
purity, look only for regular features and fresh, 
rosy complexions; later their tastes are various, 
according to their culture of mind, and still more, 


the impulses of their senses. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE, 107 





XXVITI. 


NO longer remember exactly at what date I 
founded my Museum, which for a long time 
was my chief amusement. Kather higher up than 
my Aunt Bertha’s room was a little attic quite 
apart, of which I took entire possession; the 
charm of the room lay in its window, which looked 
out, high up, to the west, over the old trees on the 
ramparts, and the remoter meadows where russet 
specks scattered on the level green, indicated oxen 
and cows, wandering herds. I had persuaded my 
parents to have this attic prepared for me, with a 
pinkish fawn-colored paper which remains to this 
day, and to have shelves and glass cases fixed. 
Here I placed my butterflies which I thought 
very precious specimens; I set up birds’ nests 
found in the woods of fa Limotse ; shells picked 
up on the shores of the island, and others brought 
home long before by unknown relations, and dis- 


interred in the loft from the depths of ancient 


108 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


sea-chests where they had been slumbering for 
years in the dust. In this little domain I spent 
many hours, alone, and quiet, lost in contempla- 
tion of exotic mother-of-pearl shells, dreaming of 
the lands whence they had come, and picturing to 
myself those strange shores. 

A kind old grand-uncle, only a distant relation 
but very fond of me, encouraged me in these 
amusements. He was a doctor, and having lived 
for a long time in his youth on the coast of Africa, 
he himself had a collection of Natural History far 
more interesting than many a town museum. 
Wonderful things were there: rare shells and 
curious amulets, weapons still reeking of the 
strange smells with which I have since been 
saturated; matchless butterflies in glass frames. 

He lived but a little way off and I often went 
to see him. To get to his museum we had to 
cross his garden where daturas and opuntias 
flourished, and where a grey parrot from the 
Gaboon lived, talking in a negro lingo. 3 

And when the old man told me about Senegal, 


and Gorea, and Guinea, the music of these names 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 109 





went to my head, a foretaste of the heavy gloom 
of the dark continent. He, my poor old uncle, 
predicted that I should become a learned natur- 
alist —and he was greatly mistaken, as so many 
others have been who prophesied my future. He, 
indeed, was further from the mark than any one; 
he did not understand that my love of natural 
history was merely a temporary digression of my 
fluctuating little fancies; that glass cases, and dry 
classification, and dead science, had nothing in 
them that could attach me for long!— No, what 
attracted me was something behind these rigid 
objects — behind and beyond them; it was 
Nature herself, terrible and many-faced, the un- 


known immensity of forests and animal life. 


XXVITT. 


T the same time I spent long hours, alas! 
ostensibly in doing my lessons. 


Topffer, the only school-boy’s poet, so gener- 


IIO A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





ally misunderstood, divides them into three 
classes: First, those at school. Secondly, those 
who work at home in a room, looking out on some 
dismal court-yard with perhaps a hoary old fig- 
tree. Thirdly, those who work at home, but 
whose bright little room looks out on the street. 

I was in this last category, which Topffer speaks 
of as a privileged class, likely to fill the world 
with the most cheerful men. My room, as a child, 
was on the first floor facing the street; white cur- 
tains, a green paper with bunches of white roses; 
near my window my writing-table and above this 
my much neglected book-shelf. As long as the 
weather was fine this window was always open 
and the shutters half-shut to allow of my con- 
stantly looking out without my idleness being 
remarked upon or reported by some unmannerly 
neighbor. So from morning till evening I could 
gaze on the quiet street basking in the sun 
between the white houses of a country town, and 
ending at the trees on the ramparts; at the rare 
passers-by, all known to me by sight; the various 


cats of the neighbourhood prowling about the 


A CHII.D’S ROMANCE. . IIL 








doorsteps or on the roofs, the swifts wheeling in the 
hot air, and the swallows skimming over the dusty 
pavement. How many hours have I spent at that 
window, my mind absent in the vague day-dreams 
of an imprisoned sparrow, while my blotted copy- 
book lay open with the first words only of an 
exercise which would not get done, of a composi- 
tion which would not flow. 

Then, of course, came a period of practical 
jokes on the passers-by; the inevitable result of 
my dull idleness not unchequered by remorse. 
But I must confess that my great friend, Lucette, 
was very ready to take her share in these practical 
jokes. Though a young lady now of sixteen or 
seventeen she was sometimes still as great a babe 
as I was. ‘ But mind you never tell!’ she would 
impress upon me with an indescribably mischiev- 
ous wink of her roguish eyes—I may tell now, 
when years have gone by and the flowers of 
twenty summers have withered on her tomb. 

We began by making up neat little parcels, 
carefully wrapped in clean paper, and firmly tied 


with pink ribbon; inside were cherry-stalks, 


112 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








plum-stones, any such little rubbish; then we 
dropped them out of window and hid behind the 
shutters to see who would pick them up. 

After this we wrote letters absolutely inco- 
herent and nonsensical, with illustrations in the 
text, and which we slyly deposited on the pave- 
ment, addressed to the different oddities who 
lived near, at the hour when they were in the 
habit of passing by. 

Oh! the mad laugh we used to have as we 
composed these effusions !— But, indeed, I have 
never met any one since Lucette with whom I 
could laugh so heartily — and almost always over 
things of which the hardly perceptible fun would 
not have brought a smile to any one else. 
Besides our faithful alliance of small brother and 
elder sister, we had in common a turn for light 
humour, a perfectly sympathetic sense of the 
incoherent and ridiculous. To me she had more 
wit than any one, and a single word would set us 
off laughing at a neighbour’s expense, or at our 
own, in sudden joyous mirth till we could no more 


and dropped with exhaustion. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. Lig 





All this I admit was not in keeping with 
gloomy apocalyptic reveries and religious con- 
troversies. But even then I wasa creature of in- 
consistencies. 

Poor little Lucette or Lugon— Lugon was a 
noun proper, masculine, singular, which I had 
devised to call her by: ‘ My dear fellow, Lugon,’ I 
used to say. — Poor little Lucette, she, too, was 
one of my teachers, but one of whom I felt 
neither disgust nor alarm. She, like M. Ratin, 
had a note-book in which she wrote good or very 
good, and which I had to show my parents every 
evening. For I forgot to mention sooner that she 
had amused herself by teaching me to play the 
piano when I was still quite tiny, in secret that I 
might, for a surprise on the occasion of some 
family festival, play the tunes of Le Petit Suzse 
and Le Rocher de Saint-Malo. As a result she 
had been requested to continue the work she had 
begun so well, and my musical education was 
carried on by her till the time when I began to 
play Chopin and Liszt. 


Painting and music were the only branches of 
8 


114 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





learning at which I really worked a little. My 
sister taught me to paint; but I do not remember 
its beginnings, I was so very young. I feel as 
though I had all my life been able to express on 
paper with pencil and paint-brush the fancies of 


my imagination. 


XXIX. 


N my grandmother’s room, at the back of the 
cupboard full of treasures where that terrible 
book of the Apocalypse was kept — the Lzdle His- 
vory —there were other very venerable posses- 
sions. In the first place there was an ancient 
copy of the Psalms, a tiny volume with silver 
clasps, like a doll’s book, which must have been a 
marvel of typography in its day. It was made so 
small, I was told, to be hidden with the greater 
ease; at the time of the persecutions ancestors of 
ours had often carried it about with them, con- 
cealed in their dress. Then, and above all, there 


were in a cardboard box a bundle of letters 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. LES 








written on parchment, stamped Leyden or Am- 
sterdam, and dating from 1702-10, with large wax 
seals bearing a monogram with a count’s coronet. 
Letters, these, of Huguenot forefathers, who at the 
revocation of the edict of Nantes, had left their 
lands, their friends, their country — everything in 
the world, to adhere to their faith. They had 
written them to an old grandfather, too-aged to 
tread the path of exile, and who had, I know not 
how, been able to remain in peace in the island of 
Oleron. They were submissive and reverential to 
him as no one dreams of being in these days, 
asking his advice and consent on every point — 
even his permission to wear a particular fashion of 
wigs which had come up in Amsterdam just then. 
Then they related all their concerns, with never a 
murmur, with evangelical resignation; their 
property being confiscated, they were obliged to 
embark in trade to make a living, and they hoped, 
they said, by God’s blessing, to have enough for 
their children to live on. 

Besides the respect I felt for these letters, 
they had for me the charm of very old things ; it 


116 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





seemed to me so strange thus to penetrate to the 
root of that old-world existence, that inmost 
home-life, now a century and a half old. 

And then, as I read, indignation filled my 
heart against the Roman Church, against Papal 
Rome, the Sovereign Power of the past, so 
clearly designated — at any rate to my apprehen- 
sion — by the amazing apocalyptic description — 
‘“‘ And the beast is a city, and its seven heads are 
the seven mountains on which the woman 
sitteth.” 

Grandmother herself, always so austere and 
erect, in her black gown, exactly as we always 
picture old Huguenot dames, had had some fears 
for her creed at the time of the restoration; and 
though she, too, never complained, it was certain 
that she had distressful memories of that time. 

Moreover, in the island, I had been shown 
under the shade of a clump of trees enclosed by 
walls, and close to our old family home, a spot 
where many of my ancestors lay sleeping, having 
been excluded from the Church cemeteries for 
having died in the Protestant faith. 


ee 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 117 








How, owning such a past, could I be otherwise 
than stanch? And it is very certain that if the 
Inquisition had been revived I should have 
endured martyrdom like a little visionary. My 
faith, indeed, was that of a pioneer; I was far 
from sharing my ancestors’ resignation; in spite 
of my general aversion for reading I was often 
found deep in works of religious controversy ; I 
knew by heart many passages of the Fathers, and 
the decisions of the early Councils of the Church. 
I could have discussed dogmas like a theologian, 
and was versed in arguments against the Papacy. 

And yet a chill was beginning to fall on me; 
at church, especially, a grey blank seemed to 
enfold me. The tedium of certain Sunday 
sermons; the soullessness of the prayers pre- 
pared beforehand and uttered with conventional 
unction and appropriate gesticulation; the indif- 
ference of the people in their Sunday clothes who 
came to listen — how soon —and with what deep 
pain, what cruel disappointment—I felt the 
sickening formalism of it all. The very aspect of 


the church depressed me. A town church —a 


118 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





temple as the Protestant places of worship are 
called in France — quite new, with an attempt at 
being ornate, but not daring to be too decorative ; 
I remember particularly certain mural ornaments 
which I positively loathed, which I shuddered to 
behold. It was the precursor of the feelings with 
which, only aggravated to excess, | at a later day 
sat in the Protestant churches of Paris and noted 
their attempt at elegance — and the beadles at the 
door with shoulder-knots! Oh! for the meetings in 
the Cévennes! Oh! for the pastors of the Desert! 

Such trifles as these, of course, could not 
shake my convictions, which seemed to be as 
firmly founded as a house on a rock; but they 
gave rise to the first imperceptible rift through 
which, drop by drop, an icy damp began to 
00ze. 

The place where I still could find true devout- 
ness, the real and restful peace of the House of 
God, was the old Protestant church of Saint- 
Pierre d’Oleron; my grandfather Samuel, in the 
days of the persecution, must often have wor- 


shipped there, and my mother had attended the 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 11g 








services all through her early life. —I also liked 
those little village chapels to which we sometimes 
went on Sundays in the summer; most of them 
very old, with bare, white, lime-washed walls; 
built no matter where — at the edge of a cornfield, 
wild flowers growing all round them, or hidden 
away at the bottom of a garden, at the end of an 
avenue of ancestral trees. The Catholics them- 
selves have nothing which can excel in charm the 
humble sanctuaries of our Protestant sea-board — 
not even those most exquisite chapels of granite 
buried in the woods of Brittany, which I admired 
so much at a later date. 

I was still quite determined to be a minister ; 
in the first place I thought it my duty. I had 
promised and vowed it in my prayers; could I 
break my word? But when my little brain tried 
to plan the future, which seemed more and more 
wrapped in impenetrable darkness, my fancy 
always dwelt in preference on a home somewhat 
apart from the world, where the faith of my flock 
should still be simple, and my humble church hal- 
lowed by a long past of prayer. 


120 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

In the island of Oleron for instance— 

Yes, there, in the island of Oleron, in the 
midst of the memorials of my Huguenot fore- 
fathers, there I could look forward with greater 
ease and less dread to a life sacrificed to the 


service of the Lord. 


Y brother had reached the Delightful Island. 

His first letter from beyond seas, a very 

long one, on very thin paper, and yellow with 

the voyage, had been four months on its way 
to us. 

It was an event in our family life; I can 
remember now, how, while my father and mother 
were opening it below, I joyfully flew upstairs to 
call grandmother and aunts down from. their 


rooms. 


Inside the envelope, so full of sheets and © 


covered all over with American stamps, there was 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. I21 


a little note for me, and on opening it I found a dried 
flower, a five-petaled star, faded and pale, but still 
pink. This flower, my brother told me, had 
grown and bloomed close to’ his window, actually 
inside his Tahitian cabin into which the lovely 
greenery of that zone forced its way. Oh, with 
what strange eagerness — with what curiosity as I 
may say, did I gaze at and touch this periwinkle 
which came as a fragment still vivid, still almost 
living of that remote and unknown Nature! — 
Then I put it away, with so much care that I have 
it to this day. 

And when, after many years, I made a pil- 
grimage to the hut which my brother had lived in 
on the other side of the world I found, in fact, 
that the shady plot which surrounded it was pink 
with such periwinkles, that they crept over the 
threshold and blossomed within the deserted 


home. 


122 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





XXXYI. 


HEN my ninth year was complete there was 

for a short time some talk of sending me 

to school, to break me in to the miseries of the 
world ; and while this was in the air I lived for a 
few days in terror of that prison, knowing the 
outside of it by its walls and the windows closed 
by iron bars. But on due reflection, it was 
decided that I was too delicate and precious a 
blossom to be exposed to contact with other 
children, who might have rough games and rude 


manners; so it was settled that I was still to stay 
at home. 


However, I was delivered from M. Ratin. A 
good old tutor, with a round face, took his place ; 
he displeased me less, but I did not work any the 
more. In the afternoon, when the hour of his 
coming was near, after scrambling through my 
exercises I would post myself at my window to 


watch for him from behind my shutters, with my 





= oe Ma Ee elas sta a i tii eta ee i i it te 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 123 





lesson-book open at the piece I had to learn; and 
as soon as I spied him in the offing — round a 
corner at the furthest end of the street—I began 
to study it. And generally by the time he came 
in I knew it well enough to have a “ pretty good” 
mark, which saved me from a scolding. 

I also had an English master who came every 
morning, and whom I called Aristogiton — why, 
I never knew. Teaching me on the Robertsonian 
method, he made me paraphrase the History of 
Sultan Mahmoud. He, indeed, was the one 
person who thoroughly understood the situation ; 
he was entirely convinced that I was doing 
nothing, less than nothing. But he had the good 
taste to make no complaints, and my gratitude 
soon became real affection. 

In the summer, when the days were very hot, 
it was in the garden that I made believe to work ; 
I loaded a certain green table under an arbour of 
ivy vine and honeysuckle, with copy-books, and 
blotted and ink-stained volumes. And as I was 
admirably situated for idling in perfect safety — 
all danger could be discerned so far off through 


124 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





the trellice and green branches, while I could not 
be seen—I took care to provide myself in this 
retreat with a store of cherries, or of grapes, 
according to the season; and really I should have 
spent there many hours of delicious day-dreaming, 
but for the irrepressible fits of remorse which 
troubled me so constantly——remorse for not 
doing my lessons. 

Between the dropping garlands of leaves I 
could see, close by, the sparkling pool surrounded 
by lilliputian grottoes for which I had a sort of 
worship since my brother’s departure. On its 
tiny surface, all dimpled by the little jet of water, 
the sunbeams danced and were reflected at an 
angle, to be lost in the green vault above me on 
the underside of the boughs, a gleaming shimmer 
that was never still. 

This arbour was a peaceful and shady nook 
where I could persuade myself that I was really 
in the country ; I could listen to the foreign birds 
twittering on the other side of the old walls, in the 
aviary belonging to Antoinette’s mamma, and to 
the free birds too, the martins under the eaves, 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 125 
or the less pretentious sparrows in the gardens 
near. 

Sometimes I would stretch myself at full 
length on the green bench, to stare up between 
the sprays of honeysuckle at the white clouds 
sailing across the blue sky. I studied the manners 
and customs of the mosquitoes, who clung all day to 
the nether-side of the leaves, quivering on 
their long legs. Or else I concentrated my cap- 
tivated attention on the old wall behind, where 
dreadful tragedies took place in the insect world ; 
cunning spiders suddenly rushing out of their 
holes to seize some poor little heedless insect — 
which I almost always rescued with a straw. 

I had too —I forgot to mention —the society 
of an old cat I dearly loved, and called. Supremacy, 
the faithful companion of my childhood. 

Supremacy, knowing the hours when I was to 
be found there, would come stealthily in on the tip- 
toes, so to speak, of his velvet paws, but never 
jumped up on me till he had consulted me with an 
enquiring look. He was very ugly, poor beast, 


queerly patched with colour on one side of his 


126 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





face; then a disastrous accident had set his tail 
askew, broken it at a right angle. Thus he was 
the subject of Lucette’s constant raillery, for had 
not she a dynasty of the loveliest Angora cats in 
endless succession? When I went to see her, 
after asking after every member of my family, she 
hardly ever failed to add, with an air of conde- 
scension. which sent me into fits of laughing: 
“ And that horror of a cat. He is well I hope, 
my dear child.” 


XXXII. 


EANWHILE my museum made great pro- 
gress; I had been obliged to have more 
shelves put up. My grand-uncle whom I often 
went to see and who took an increasing interest in 
my taste for natural history, found among his col- 
lection of shells several duplicates of which he 
made mea present. With indefatigable kindness 


and patience he taught me the learned classifica- 





2h TE lt eg 


oS. eee a a 


~ ee i ee ee 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. E27 








tions of Cuvier, Linnzeus, Lamarck and Bruguiéres; 
and I am amazed to remember how attentive I 
was. | 

On a little old desk, very old, which formed 
part of the furniture. of my museum, I kept a 
copy-book in which, from his notes, I copied 
down for each shell, carefully numbered, the name 
of ifs species, genus, family and class, and then 
that of the place it had come from. And there, 
in the subdued light which fell on my table, and 
the silence of that little den, so high up, and 
lonely, and filled with objects brought from the 
uttermost ends of the earth or unfathomed depths 
of the sea, when my mind had wondered long 
over the changeful mystery of animal forms and 
the infinite variety of shells, with what deep 
emotion I would write down opposite the name of 
a Pyrula or a Terebratula such words as these — 
redolent of enchantment and sunshine: ‘ Eastern - 
coast of Africa; ‘“ Coast of Guinea;’”’ ‘ Indian 
Ocean.” 

It was in this same little room that I remember 


experiencing one afternoon in March, one of the 


128 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 
strangest symptoms of that craving for reaction 
which, at a later period, in hours of entire self- 
abandonment, was to drive me into the noise and 
tumult, the simple, animal joyousness of sailors. 
It was Shrove Tuesday. I had been out in 
the sunshine with my father to see something of 
the masqueraders in the streets; then, having 
come in early, I had gone straight upstairs to 
amuse myself with my shells and my classifica- 
tion. But the distant shouts of the masks, and 
the rumble of their drums followed me into my 
learned retirement, bringing with them an intoler- 
able melancholy. It was an impression of the 
same kind, only far more distressing, as that left 
by the chant of the old cake-woman when her 
voice died away down the narrow streets and 
ramparts on winter nights. It was perfect anguish, 
sudden and unexpected, but quite vague. Ina 
dumb confused way I was distressed at feeling 
myself shut in, with dead, dry things only fit for 
old men, while out-of-doors the common boys of 
every age and size, and the sailors — greater boys 


still— were running, and jumping, and singing at 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. - 129 





the top of their voices and wearing penny masks 
over their faces. I had not the smallest wish to 
be with them, I need hardly say; I even realized 
the impossibility with disdain and disgust. And 
I wanted very much to be just where I was, to 
reduce the many-tinted family of the Purpuridae 
to order—as the twenty-third of the Gastero- 
poda. 

But all the same those people in the street 
troubled me strangely. And then, feeling so un- 
happy, I went down to find my mother and 
beseech her to come up and keep me company. 
Astonished at my request, for as a rule I invited 
no one into my sanctuary, and above all surprised 
at my look of distress, she at first said jestingly 
that it was ridiculous for a boy nearly ten years 
old — still she at once agreed to come and settled 
herself with me in my museum, her embroidery in 
her hand —almost uneasy at my desire. 

But then, easy in my mind, warmed by her 
mere presence, I set to work again and thought 
no more of the masqueraders, only looking at the 
window from time to time to see against the pane 


9 


130 * A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


the outline of her dear face,as the March day 


closed in. 


XXXITI. 


T is not surprising that I no longer remember 


the process, whether slow or swift, by which — 


my vocation to be a minister became the more 
militant purpose to be a missionary. It seems to 
me that it must have been at an earlier period; 
for as long as I can remember I had always 
been eager about Protestant missions, above all to 
Southern Africa, the land of the Basutos. And 
from my very babyhood I had been a subscriber 
to Le Messager, a monthly magazine, and the 
picture on the title-page had struck me at an early 
age. This picture I may certainly place at the 
head of the list of those I spoke of as making an 
impression in spite of drawing, colour, or perspec- 
tive. It represented an impossible palm-tree, on 
the shore of the sea behind which an enormous 


sun was setting; and, at the foot of the tree, a 





4 
‘< 
‘ 
“ 
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‘ 
i 
2 
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7 
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A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 131 





young savage watching the advent, from the 
remotest horizon, of the vessel bringing the Good 
Tidings of Salvation. In the very earliest begin- 
nings of myself, when, as I lay in my little 
feathered nest, the world as yet appeared to me 
shapeless and grey, this picture had filled my 
brain with dreams. I was now able to understand 
the childishness of the design and execution, but 
I was still under the charm of that huge sun half 
swallowed in the sea, and of the little mission- 
ship in full sail towards an unknown land. 

So now, when I was questioned, I would 
reply: ‘I shall be a missionary.” But I spoke 
in a bated tone, as one not very sure of his 
powers; and I knew too that no one believed me. 
My mother listened to the announcement with a 
sad smile; at first, because this was beyond what 
she asked of my faith; and afterwards, because 
she divined no doubt that it would not be that, 
but something else, more changeful, and for the 
present impossible to foresee quite clearly. 

A missionary! This seemed to combine 


everything. — Distant voyages, an adventurous 


132 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





life of constant peril—but in the service of the 
Lord and his sacred cause. This, for a time, left 
my conscience at ease. 

But having hit on this solution, I avoided 
allowing my mind to dwell on it for fear of dis- 
covering some fresh terror in it. But yes, the 
cold water of commonplace sermons, vain repe- 
titions, and religious cant, still dripped on my 
early faith. On the other hand, my weariful fears 
of life and of the future increased daily; a 
leaden curtain hung across my darkened path, and 
I could not lift its heavy folds. 


XXXIV. 


| sy what has gone before I have not said enough 

of Ja Limoise, the spot where I was first in- 
troduced to the things of nature. All my child- 
hood is closely connected with that speck of 
earth, its old oak-woods, and its stony soil car- 


peted with wild thyme or heather. During ten or 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 133 





twelve glorious summers I spent all my Thursday 
half-holidays there, and dreamed of it moreover 
from one Thursday to the next, all through the 
dreary days of lessons. 

In the month of May our friends the D***s 
removed to this country house, Lucette with them, 
to stay after the vintage till the first crisp days of 
October; and I was taken there regularly every 
Wednesday evening. Only to go there was to me 
a beginning of delights. Very seldom did we 
drive, for it was but four miles or so away, though 
it seemed to me so very remote, so utterly lost in 
the woods. It lay to the south towards the 
region of warmer lands; if it had been to the 
north the charm would, to me, have been less. 

So every Wednesday evening, when the sun 
was low—the hour varying with the month—I set 
out for the country with Lucette’s brother, a great 
boy of eighteen or twenty, who at that time 
seemed to me a man of ripe age. I kept step 
with him as nearly as I could, walking faster than 
when I was out with my father and sister; we 


went down through the low quarters of the town, 


134 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





all quiet now, past the old sailors’ barracks whence 
the familiar sound of bugles and drums came up 
as far as my museum on days when the wind blew 
from the south; then we passed out through the 
fortifications by the oldest and most weather- 
beaten gate—a gate little used excepting by 
peasants and flocks, and came out at last on the 
road leading to the river. 

About a mile of a perfectly straight avenue, 
bordered at that time by very old pollard trees, all 
yellow with lichen, and with all their branches, 
like hair, blown to the left by the sea breeze 
sweeping incessantly from the west, across the 
broad waste of fields along the coast. 

To those persons who, having pre-conceived 
notions of landscape beauty, insist on the pictur- 
esque of a vignette—a brook flowing between 
trees with a mountain crowned by a castle —I 
confess that this flat road is very ugly. For my 
part, I think it exquisite, notwithstanding the level 
lines of the horizon. To right and left, nothing 
but stretches of pasture where herds of cattle 


wander and feed; and in front of us what looks 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 135 





like a wall bounding the meadows rather sadly, 
like a long rampart: this is the cliff ending the 
stony plain beyond the river which flows at its 
foot— the further shore, higher than this and 
different in character, but no less flat and monoton- 
ous. It is in this very monotony that the charm 
lies for me of our unappreciated coast; the calm 
uniformity of the lines is unbroken for long 
stretches, and profoundly restful. 

In our whole neighbourhood that familiar road 
is indeed what I love best, probably because so 
many of my school-boy visions were built up on 
those flat distances, where I still seem to see them 
from time to time. Also, it is the only scene 
which has not been spoilt for me by factories, docks 
and railway stations. It is mine absolutely, with- 
out anyone suspecting it, or dreaming, in conse- 
quence, of disputing my possession. 

The entire charm which the exterior world 
seems to possess for us, resides in ourselves, ema- 
nates from us, is diffused by us, — each one for 
himself of course,— and is only reflected back to us. 


But I did not learn young enough to believe in 


136 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


this familiar truism. Hence, in my earliest years, 
the whole charm was localized for me in the 
weather-worn walls and the honeysuckles of 
our back garden, in the sands of “our island,” in 
level meadow-land or stony common. After- 
wards, by scattering it broadcast I only succeeded 
in enchanting the spring. For alas! that land of 
my childhood — whither perhaps I shall return to 
die — has lost much of its breadth and colour in 
my eyes; it is only now and then, here and there, 
that I can revive the illusions of the past; and 
besides, as is but natural, I am haunted there by 
too crushing memories of all that is gone. 

Well, I was saying that every Wednesday 
evening I took that road with a light step to make 
my way towards the rocky cliff which closed in 
the pasture land, that region of oaks and boulders 
where /a Limotse was situated, and which my 
imagination at that time magnified enormously. 
The river, which we had to cross, lay at the end 
of that straight avenue of gnarled trees in their 
dress of golden lichen, wrung and tossed by the 


west wind. The river itself was very uncertain, 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 137 





the sport of tides and of the caprices of the ocean. 
We could cross in a ferryboat or in a yawl, 
navigated by the same men whom I had always 
known, old sailors with faces blackened and beards 
bleached by the sun. 

On the further shore, the land of stones, I 
seemed all at once to have left the town far, far 
behind me. Its grey walls were still in sight, but 
to my small wit distance increased by jerks and 
became suddenly remote. Everything about me, 
to be sure, was quite different: the soil, the wild 
flowers, the grasses, and the butterflies which 
flitted over them. Nothing here was the same as 
in the marshes and meadows about the town 
where I took my walks on other days of the week. 
And these differences, which others would not 
have noticed, could not fail to strike and delight 
me, accustomed as I was to waste my time in such 
minute observation of the minutest objects of 
nature and to lose myself in the contemplation of 
the tiniest mosses. The very twilights of those 
Wednesdays had something peculiar about them 


which I could not account for; the sun was gener- 


138 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. ' 





ally setting just when we reached the further shore, 
and seen from the higher ground, the lonely plateau 
on which we stood, it seemed to me larger than 
usual as its red disk was swallowed up behind the 
fields of tall hay-grass which we had left behind us. 

Having thus crossed the river we immediately 
quitted the high road, and followed the almost im- 
perceptible paths which crossed a region, odiously 
profaned, alas! in those days, but then most 
exquisite, called les Chaumes. 

This was a tract of common land belonging to 
the village, the antique spire of whose church 
appeared in the distance. Being public property 
it remained comparatively wild. A sort of plateau 
composed of a floor of rock slightly undulating 
and covered as with a carpet of short, dry, sweetly- 
smelling plants which crackled under foot ; a whole 
world of tiny butterflies and quaintly-coloured 
microscopic beetles lived among the scarce little 
flowers. 

Occasionally we came across a flock of sheep, 
and the shepherdesses who looked after them were 


much more countrified and sunburnt than those 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 139° 
who lived nearer the town. And this melancholy 
common, all burnt with the sun, was to me the 
vestibule of /a Lzmozse ,; it already had the smell 
of wild thyme and marjoram. 

At the end of this little moor was the hamlet 
of Frelin, —I was fond of that name of Frelin. 
I always thought it was derived from those great 
hornets (frelons) in the woods of a Limozse, which 
built their nests in the hearts of certain oak-trees 
and which were destroyed in the spring by making 
great fires round them. The hamlet was composed 
of three or four cottages; low, as is the custom in 
our country, and old, grey with age; there were 
Gothic finials over the little round doorways and 
coats of arms half effaced. The glimpse I caught 
of them, almost always at the same hour and in 
the fading light, conjured up in my mind the 
mystery of the past; above all they demonstrated 
the antiquity of this rocky soil, far earlier than the 
fields round our town which have been reclaimed 
from the sea, and where nothing is much older 
than the time of Louis XIV. 

After le Frelin, I began to look ahead along 


140 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 
the little paths where, as a rule, I very soon spied 
Lucette, coming to meet us, either walking or 
driving with her father or mother; and directly I 
saw her I ran forward to greet her. 

We passed through the village and skirted the 
walls of the church, a marvellous little building of 
the twelfth century, in the rarest and very ancient 
Romanesque style;—then in the twilight which 
had been fast fading, a dark band seemed to rise 
before one: the forest of Limoise almost entirely 
composed of oaks with their dark thick foliage. 
Soon we were walking in the private roads of the 
estate, and passed the well where the thirsty oxen 
patiently waited their turn to drink. At last the 
little gate was reached and opened, and we entered 
the turfed court-yard, already plunged into dark- 
ness by the shadows of the century-old trees. 
The house was built between this court-yard and 
a garden left to run wild which bordered on the 
wood. 

In entering the old rooms, with their white- 
washed walls and ancient wood-work, the first 


thing I sought was my butterfly net, which hung 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 141 





on the wall, always in the same place, ready for 
the hunt of the morrow. 

After dinner, the evening was usually spent 
seated at the end of the garden on the benches 
in an arbour with its back against the fence, — its 
back turned on the unknown of the darkness 
beyond out of which came the hooting of the owls. 
And while we were there, in the beautiful, warm 
night, with bright stars overhead and the silence 
full of the chirping of crickets, suddenly a bell 
began to toll, very distant but very clear, down 
in the village church. 

Oh! the Axgelus of Echillais, heard in that 
garden in the beautiful evenings of days gone by! 
Oh! the sound of that bell, a little cracked, but 
silvery still, like those voices of some very old 
people, which have been pretty and still remain 
sweet! What acharm of the past, of calm devo- 
tion and peaceful death that sound diffused in the 
limpid darkness of the country! ... And the bell 
rang on, in the distance, sometimes nearer, some- 
times farther, as the sound was wafted to and fro 
by the warm breaths of air. I thought of all the 


142 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


people who must be listening to it in the lonely 
farms around, and I thought of all the deserted 
spots near, where there was no one to hear it, and 
shuddered as I thought of the wood so close at 
hand, in which the last vibrations died away. 

A municipal council, composed of superior 
minds, after having tricked-out the old belfry with 
a flagstaff and a tri-colour flag, finally suppressed 
the Angelus. So there is an end of it; no one 
will now, in the summer evening, hear that time- 
honoured call... . 

After that, how cheerful it was to go to bed, 
with the next day in prospect, Thursday, when 
one could amuse oneself all day. I should very 
likely have been frightened in the guest-chambers 
which were on the ground-floor of the big solitary 
house; so until I was twelve years old I was put 
upstairs in Lucette’s mother’s big bedroom, be- 
hind some screens which made me a little room 
of my own. 

In my little corner was a glass book-case 
filled with books on navigation of the last century, 


mariners’ log-books which had not been opened 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 143 





for a hundred years. And on the whitewashed 
walls there were every summer the same imper- 
ceptible little moths which flew in at the open 
windows in the daytime and slept there with out- 
spread wings. Then there were some incidents 
which completed the evening’s amusement, which 
always happened unexpectedly just as we were 
going to sleep: An unseasonable bat who made 
his entrance and flew madly round and round the 
lights, or an enormous buzzing moth which had to 
be chased out with a turk’s head broom. Some- 
times a storm broke loose, stirring up the trees 
which rattled their branches against the wall; 
bursting open the old windows which had been 
carefully closed, disturbing everything. I havea 
vivid recollection of those fearful and magnificent’ 
storms of /a Limozse as they appeared to me in 
those days when everything was grander and 
larger than it is nowadays, and throbbed with a 


greater intensity of existence. 


144 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








XXXV. 


T was about that time as far as I can remem- 
ber —when I was nearly eleven —that the 
apparition rises of another little friend who was 
soon to be in high infantine favour with me— 
(Antoinette had left the country; Véronique was 
forgotten.) 

She was called Jeanne and belonged to a 
family of naval officers who, like the D***s, had 
been connected with our own for more than a 
century. Her elder by two or three years, I had 
not at first taken any notice of her, thinking her 
too much of a baby no doubt. 

To begin with, she had such a puny kitten-like 
face; it was impossible to foresee what the too 
tiny features might become, to say whether she 
would turn out pretty or ugly; then soon she 
acquired a certain winning grace, and by the time 
she was eight or ten years old had developed into 
a charming, darling little girl, Very full of fun 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 145 





and as sociable as I was shy; and as she went to 
many dances and children’s parties to which I 
never went, she seemed to me the acme of 
fashionable elegance and correctness. 

In spite of the intimacy between our two 
families it was obvious that her parents looked 
askance at our growing friendship, perhaps not 
approving of her having a boy for a companion, 
I was very much hurt at this, and so vivid are our 
childish impressions, that it took years, — indeed 
I was almost a young man, before I could forgive 
her father and mother the slights I then felt. 

In consequence, I felt a growing desire to be 
allowed to play with her, and she, seeing this, 
assumed the part of the inaccessible little princess 
of the fairy tales, laughed mercilessly at my shy- 
ness, my awkward way of holding myself, my 
blundering entrance into the drawing-room ; there 
was a constant passage of arms between us, or an 
endless exchange of priceless compliments. 

When I was invited to pass the day with her, 
I enjoyed it very much in anticipation, but I had 


many mortifications afterwards, for I was always 


se) 


146 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

doing something stupid in the presence of people 
who did not understand me. And whenever I 
wanted her to come and dine with me it had to be 
carefully negotiated by my grand-aunt Bertha 
who was a person of authority in their eyes. 

One day, when she came back from Paris, 
little Jeanne delighted me with an account of the 
fairy tale of Peau d’Ane,* which she had seen 
acted. 

Her time, at any rate, was not thrown away, for 
Peau ad’ Ane was destined for four or five years to 
take up many hours, more precious than any I 
have wasted since. 

Together we formed the splendid idea of 
mounting it on a little theatre which I possessed. 
This undertaking threw us together. — And little 
by little the project assumed in our heads the most 
gigantic proportions; it grew and grew, from 
month to month, as our powers of execution per- 
fected themselves. We painted fantastic scenery, 


we dressed numberless little dolls for the proces- 





* A popular fairy tale in which a princess is disguised in an ass's 
skin. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 147 





sions. Indeed, I shall often recur to this fairy tale 
which was one of the principal features of my 
childhood. 

And even after Jeanne was tired of it, I went 
on with it alone, out-doing myself, launching out 
into grand enterprises, moonlight effects, illumina- 
tions, storms. I also made marvellous palaces, 
and gardens worthy of Aladdin. All the dreams 
of enchanted dwellings, and of foreign luxury 
which I realized, more or less, at a later time in 
different corners of the globe, had their origin for 
the first time on the little stage in this fairy tale: 
as I emerged from my mysterious beginnings, I 
might almost say that all the chimera of my life 
was first tried, put into action on that tiny stage. 
I must have been fifteen when the last scenes, still 
unfinished, were consigned forever to the card- 
board boxes which still serve as their silent 
tomb. 

And since I am anticipating the future, I may 
as well say the final word on this subject: during 
the last few years, now Jeanne has grown into a 


beautiful woman, we have twenty times talked of 


148 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








opening together the boxes where our little dead 
dolls are sleeping, but we live so fast in the 
present day, that we have never yet found time, 
and never shall. 

Our children, perhaps, some day — or, who 
knows, our grandchildren! In some future age 
when we are forgotten, our unknown successors, 
rummaging at the bottom of the mysterious cup- 
boards, will make the extraordinary discovery of 
hosts of little people, nymphs, fairies and genii 


dressed by our hands. 


XXXVI. 


T appears that certain children who live far 
inland, have an intense longing to see the sea. 

I, who had never quitted our monotonous plains, 
craved for a sight of the mountains. I pictured 
to myself as best I could, what they must be like; 
I had seen some in pictures, I had even painted 


them myself in the scenery of Peau d’ Ane. My 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 149 





sister, during her travels in the neighbourhood of 
Lucerne, had sent me descriptions of them, had 
written me long letters about them, such as are 
not usually written to children at the age I then 
was. And my ideas had been further enlarged by 
some photographs of some glaciers which she had 
brought me for my stereoscope. But I ardently 
wished to see them with my owneyes. One day, 
as if in answer to my wishes, an eventful letter 
came. It was from a first cousin of my father’s ; 
they had been brought up together as brothers, 
but, for what reason I know not, nothing had been 
heard of him for thirty years. When I was born, 
they had already given up talking about him, 
consequently I had never heard of his existence. 
And it was he who wrote, begging that the old 
friendship might be renewed: he lived, he said, in 
a little southern town, buried among mountains ; 
he also announced that he had some sons and a 
daughter of the respective ages of my brother 
and sister. His letter was very affectionate and 
the reply was in the same strain, telling him of 


our existence. 


150 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








Then, the correspondence having continued, 
it was decided that I should go there with my 
sister to spend the holidays, and that she should 
fill a mother’s place to me as when we went 
to the island. 

The South, the mountains, this sudden widen- 
ing of my horizon—and also these new cousins 
fallen from the skies, became the constant subject 
of my thoughts till the month of August, which 


was the time fixed for our departure. 


XXXVII. 


ITTLE Jeanne had been spending the day 
with me; it was the end of May, during that 

same spring of expectation, and I was twelve 
years old. All the afternoon we had been re- 
hearsing our little jointed china dolls, five or six 
centimetres high; we had painted some of the 
scenery, we had been working at Peau d’Ane, in 


short, in the midst of a fine mess of paints, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. I51 





brushes, cuttings of card-board, gilt paper and 
scraps of gauze. Then when the time came to go 
down into the dining-room, we put all our 
precious work into a large box, which from that 
day, was sacred to that use and of which the 
inside, made of new deal, had a strong smell of 
pine resin. 

After dinner, in the long peaceful twilight, we 
were taken for a walk together. But out of doors 
it was unexpectedly chilly —and this of itself 
saddened me to begin with —and the spring sky 
had a haze over it, which reminded me of winter. 
Instead of taking us out of the town, into the 
avenues and roads always gay with promenaders, 
we wended our way towards the big garden of the 
Marina, a more select spot, but always deserted 
after sunset. 

On our way there, down a long straight street 
where not a soul was to be seen, as we passed the 
chapel of the Orphanage, we heard bells ringing 
and service going on for the ‘“‘ Month of Mary ;” 
then a procession came out; little girls dressed in 


white, who seemed to shiver in their May muslins. 


152 A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 





After taking a turn round the deserted quarter, 
and chanting a melancholy hymn, the modest 
procession, with its two or three banners, with- 
drew silently ; nobody in the street had taken any 
notice of it; from one end to the other, we were 
the sole occupants; a feeling came over me that 
no one in the grey sky had noticed it either, 
that that too was empty. The poor little proces- 
sion of forsaken children had touched my heart, 
and added to my disenchantment of May evenings 
the consciousness of the vanity of prayer and the 
nothingness of all things. 

In the garden of the Marina, my sadness 
increased. It was decidedly cold, and to our 
surprise we actually shivered in our spring attire. 
Added to which there was not a single creature in 
sight. The big chestnuts in flower, the trees with 
their crowd of young leaves, fresh and bright, 
stood side by side in close array, absolutely alone ; 
the magnificence of their verdure was spread out 
for no one to look at under an unchanging sky 
of cold, pale grey. In the flower-beds were a 


profusion of roses, peonies and _ lilies, which 


_——™ 


SS 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 153 





seemed to have mistaken the season, and to shiver 
as we did with the sudden chill of the twilight. 

I have often found the melancholy of spring- 
time far greater than that of autumn; doubtless 
because it is all wrong, a deception in the one 
thing in the world which ought never to be a 
failure. | 

Being put out by all these things I was moved 
to play a school-boy trick on Jeanne. 

I was sometimes tempted to do this to pay her 
out for being cleverer and forwarder than myself. 
I persuaded her to smell quite close to some 
charming lilies, and while she leaned over them, 
by a slight push at the back of her head I buried 
her nose in the flowers and covered it with yellow 
pollen. She was naturally indignant, and the 
knowledge that I had committed an uncourteous 
act, spoiled the rest of the walk home. 

The beautiful evenings of May!...I had 
nevertheless a recollection of pleasant ones in 
preceding years; and were they like this ?... This 
cold, this lowering sky, these solitary gardens? 


And this day of amusement with Jeanne so soon 


154 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


over, so badly ended! Inwardly I concluded 
with the deadly: “Is that all?’ which became 
later one of my commonest reflections; I might 
as well have taken it for my motto. When I got 
home, I went to look at the result of our after- 
noon’s work in the wooden chest, and I smelt the 
aromatic odour of the deal boards which had 
scented all our theatrical properties. Well, for a 
long time, for a year, two years or more, that same 
smell of the chest of Peau d’ Ane brought vividly 
back to me that May evening and its intense sad- 
ness, which was one of the most singular experi- 
ences of my young life. However, as a man I 
have never gone through those spasms of anguish 
from no recognizable cause with their undercur- 
rent of misery at not understanding, at feeling 
that I had lost my footing always in the same un- 
fathomable abyss. 

I have hardly ever suffered since without, at 
any rate, knowing why. No, those things were 
peculiar to my childhood, and this book might as 
well have borne the title (a dangerous one I grant 


you): “ Journal of my unexplained sorrows, and 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 155 








of the tricks by which occasionally I sought to 
forget them.”’ 


XXXVITI. 


T was about this same time that I took posses- 

sion of my Aunt Claire’s room, for preparing 

my lessons and working at Peau d@’ Ane. I settled 

myself in it as a conqueror in a vanquished 

country, spreading my things about everywhere, 

the thought of being in the way never occurring 
to me. 

In the first place, Aunt Claire was the person 
who indulged me most. Then she was so careful 
with all my treasures. If I had taken out any 
fragile things, things that the slightest draught 
would blow away, for instance, butterflies or 
beetles’ wings to decorate the costumes of my 
nymphs and fairies—I had but to say to her, 
“dear Aunt, I trust to you looking after them,” I 
could be quite easy in my mind, and go and leave 


them, sure that no one would touch them. 


156 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


One of the chief attractions of that room was 
the bear which contained sugar almonds; I some- 
times went in for the sole purpose of paying him 
a visit. He was made of china and seated on his 
hind legs, resided on a corner of the mantel-piece. 
It was understood between Aunt Claire and me, 
that whenever his head was turned on one side 
(and it was often so turned, three or four times in 
the course of the day), that there was a burnt- 
almond or other sugar-plum awaiting me. When 
I had eaten it I carefully put his head on straight, 
to show I had been there, and went away. Aunt 
Claire, too, helped with Peau d’ Ane ,; she worked 
at the dresses, and every day I set her a task. She 
had especially undertaken the head-dresses of the 
nymphs and fairies; on their china heads, no 
bigger than the top of one’s little finger, she fixed 
blond silken wigs, which she afterwards curled in 
scattered ringlets, by means of imperceptible curl- 
ing pins. 

Then, when I made up my mind to learn my 
lessons, in the last feverish half-hour, having 


wasted my time in all sorts of idleness, it was 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 157 








Aunt Claire again who came to my assistance. 
She took charge of the big dictionary and looked 
up my words for my exercises and translations. 
She had even taught herself to read Greek, in 
order to help me to learn my lessons in that 
language. For that study I dragged her out on 
the stair-case, where I spread myself out on the 
steps, my feet higher than my head: for two or 
three years following, this was my classic attitude 
during the repetition of the Cyropedia or the 
Iliad. 


XXXIX. 


T was a real joy when a storm broke over /a 
Limotse on a Thursday evening, and pre- 
vented my returning home. 

On more than one occasion it has been known 
to occur. I could therefore buoy myself up with 
this hope on the days I had not finished my 
tasks... (For a pitiless professor had inaugurated 
Thursday tasks; I was now obliged to drag down 


158 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








books and copy-books with me; my _ poor 
days in the open air were quite darkened by 
them.) 

It happened one evening that the longed-for 
storm had come with splendid violence, and at 
about eight o’clock Lucette and I, both a little 
alarmed, were together in the big solemn drawing- 
room, its bare walls decorated with only two or 
three quaint old pictures in old-fashioned frames ; 
she putting the last touches to a piece of work 
under her mother’s eye; I playing softly a dance 
tune of Rameau’s on the antiquated country 
piano, and finding much pleasure in the old-world 
music thus strangely mingled with the dull roar of 
the thunder-claps. 

The work being finished, Lucette turned over 
the pages of my copy-books which were lying 
about on the table, and at one glance ascertained 
that I had not done any work, suddenly she said 
to me: ‘Where have you put your Duruy’s 
Flistory ?” 

My Duruy’s Hzstory ?... Where on earth 
could the book be? A new book with hardly any 











A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 159 


ink spots on it yet... —Oh! my Goodness! out 
there, forgotten, at the end of the garden, in the 
furthest asparagus-bed!...(For my _ historical 
studies, I frequented one of the asparagus-beds, 
which were turned in summer into a sort of glade, 
of high, feathery, green grass; whilst a certain 
hazel copse, thick, impenetrable, and as dark asa 
green cavern, was the chosen spot for the far more 
difficult work of writing Latin verses.) This time 
I was well scolded by Lucette’s mother, and it 
was decided to go at once to the rescue of the 
book. 

The expedition was organized: In front 
walked a man-servant carrying a stable lantern ; 
behind him Lucette and I, in sabots, held up with 
great difficulty, the umbrella which the storm in- 
cessantly turned inside out. 

Out of doors I no longer felt alarmed; but I 
opened my eyes wide and listened with all my 
ears. Oh! how wonderful and sinister the end of 
the garden appeared, seen in the lurid glare of the 
green fiashes, which trembled and quivered, and 


from time to time, left us blinded in the darkness. 


160 A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 

And what an impression the oak wood made on 
me,-as from its depths came now and again the 
crash of falling branches. ... 

In the asparagus-bed, we found, soaked and 
caked with mud, my Duruy’s Aizstory. Before 
the storm, the snails, no doubt, made lively by the 
approach of rain, had walked all over it, and 
drawn fantastic patterns in the glistening slime. 

Well, those snail tracks on the book remained 
there for a long time preserved by my care under 
a paper cover. They had a charmed gift of re- 
minding me of a thousand things owing to the 
power of association which always existed in my 
brain between the most dissimilar ideas if only 
once they had had any connection of mere happy 
coincidence. These little shining zigzags on the 
cover of the book, seen by candle-light called up 
at once the air by Rameau, the thin tones of the 
piano, and above them the roll of the storm ; they 
brought before my eyes a scene, suggested to me 
that very evening, by a print from Teniers hang- 
ing on the wall, of little last-century figures 


dancing in the shade of woods like those of /a 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 1614 





Limoise ; they revived a complete vision, as it had 
then appeared to me of pastoral amusements in 


the old time under old oak groves. 


XL. 


ND yet the home-coming on Thursday 
evening would sometimes have been very de- 
lightful but for my remorse over those never-done 
tasks. We went as far as the river in the carriage, 
or I rode the donkey, or we walked. As soon as 
we had turned our backs on the stony plateau of 
the southern bank and crossed the river, I always 
found my father and sister waiting for me, and 
with them I merrily set out along the straight 
road to the town, between the flat fields. I trotted 
on at a good pace in my glee at seeing my mother 
and the aunts and dear home. 
By the time we went in at the old town-gate 
it was quite dark —a spring or a summer night. 


As we passed the sailor’s barracks we could hear 


a ie 


162 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








the familiar bugle call and beat of drum proclaim- 
ing the early bed-time for the men. 

Then in our own home, it was generally at the 
end of the garden, that I found the dear black 
gowns, sitting out under the stars or in the arbour 
of honeysuckles. Even if the others had gone in 
I was sure of finding Aunt Bertha there alone — 
independent by nature she defied evening chills 
and the falling dew; and after kissing me she 
would sniff my clothes to make me laugh, and 
exclaim: ‘‘ Yes— you smell of @a Limoztse.” 

Very true —so I did. On coming from thence 
all my things had a fragrance of wild thyme and 
herbs and sheep; an aromatic flavour peculiar to 


that spot of earth. 


XLI. 


N speaking of /a Limozse I must be vain enough 
to tell the story of a thing I did which was 
really heroicas an act of obedience and fidelity to 


my promise. It occurred a short while before our 


— 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 163 











departure for the South, which so filled my 
imagination; it was in the month of July next 
after my twelfth birthday. 

On a certain Wednesday, having been sent off 
rather earlier than usual to make sure of my 
arriving before dark, at my earnest entreaty I was 
escorted no further than to the gate of the town, 
and then, for a treat, I was allowed to go alone to 
la Limozse like a big boy. 

On crossing the river I pulled out of my pocket 
with unutterable shamefacedness before those sea- 
beaten old sailors, a white silk neckerchief which 
I had promised to tie round my throat as a pre- 
caution against cold on the water. And then 
having to cross the common, a shadeless région 
always scorched by a burning sun, I fulfilled the 
pledge I had given at home—TI opened a sun- 
shade. Oh! How I felt myself blushing, how 
bitterly ridiculous when I passed a little sheperd- 
ess minding her sheep. To crown all, coming 
out of the village I met four boys, on their way 
home from school, no doubt, who even from afar 


stared at me in amazement. Good Heavens! I 


164 A CHILD’S. ROMANCE. 





felt my courage failing — could I really keep my 
word till the end? 

They came close by me, peeping under my 
hat to see a boy who was so much afraid of the 
sunshine; and one of them made this senseless 
remark which made me tingle as much as a mor- 
tal insult: “It is the Marquis of Carabas!” and 
they all began to laugh. However, I went on my 
way without flinching or replying, though the 
blood was scorching in my cheeks and humming 
in my ears, and I kept my sunshade up! 

In the course of my life, it has often been 
my fate to have insults flung at me by common 
people ignorant of the meaning of things, and to 
take no notice; but I never remember being an- 
noyed by them. But this scene! No. My 
conscience never again led me to perform so 
meritorious an act. 

And | am perfectly convinced that this incident 
and nothing else gave rise to the aversion for an 
umbrella which has haunted me through life. I 
ascribe, too, to the comforters and padding and 


excessive care generally, to which I was then a 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 165 








victim, the craving which came over me at the age 
of reactionary extremes to tan my chest in the 


sun and bare it to all the winds of heaven. 


XLIT. 


ITH my head hanging out of window as the 
train rushed on, I kept asking my sister 
who filled the opposite seat: 

‘Are not those the mountains ?” 

‘Not yet,” she would say, having the Alps in 
her mind. ‘Not yet. High hills at most.” 

It was an August day, hot and splendid. An 
express train was bearing us southwards ; we were 
on our way to the unknown cousins. 

“ But there — look there ?”’ cried I in triumph, 
gazing with wide open eyes at something higher 
than all else, a blue shape on the clear horizon. 

She leaned out. ‘‘ Ah, yes,’ saidshe. ‘ This 
time I grant you. — They are not very high, but 
Shih iti? 

Everything was a delight to us that evening, 


e 


166 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








at the hotel in a town where we were obliged to 
stay till the morrow; and I remember the glorious 
night that fell while we stood with our elbows on 
the rail of our balcony watching the blue moun- 
tains grow dark, and listening to the chirp of the 
grasshoppers. 

Next day, the third of our journey, which had 
been divided into stages, we hired a funny little 
vehicle to convey us to the little town —then 
quite out of the world—where our relations 
dwelt. Through narrow gorges and ravines and 
across bridges we had five hours, which to me 
were perfect enchantment. Besides the mere fact 
of the mountains, every little thing was new and 
strange; the soil and stones were vivid red; 
instead of our hamlets. always so white with 
snowy lime-wash, and always so uniformly low, as 
though they dared not lift their heads above the 
vast level of the plain, here the houses, like the 
rocks, were ruddy and uplifted quaint gables and 
old turrets, high, very high up on the ridges of 
the hills. The peasants were brown-skinned and 


talked an unknown tongue, and the women especi- 


= 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 167 
ally attracted my attention, walking with a free 
balance unknown to our peasant women and car- 
rying loads or sheaves on their head, or huge 
copper water-jars. My every faculty was awake 
and alert — perilously fascinated by this first 
revelation of foreign and unknown life. 

Late in the day we reached the strange little 
town which was our destination, on the banks of 
one of those southern rivers which rush noisily 
over their shallow bed of white boulders. 
It still had its ancient arched gateways, its high 
machicolated ramparts, its streets of Gothic 
houses — and dull red was the general hue of all 
the buildings. 

Somewhat puzzled and excited we looked 
about for these cousins whose faces were unknown 
to us even by portraits, and who, to be sure, 
would be on the look-out for us and have come to 
meet us. Suddenly we discerned a tall young 
fellow, and on his arm a girl in a white muslin 
dress; and at once, without the least hesitancy on 
either side, we exchanged tokens of recognition — 


we had found each other. 


168 A. CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





At their own door on the steps stood the 
parents to welcome us; both in advanced life, 
having still the traces of remarkable beauty. 
They had an old house dating from the time of 
Louis XIII, in the corner of one of those squares 
built round with porches, such as are often seen in 
our little southern country-towns. We went first 
into a hall paved with pinkish stone, where, on 
one side, there was an enormous copper cistern 
with a tap. A staircase of the same stone, very 
wide and with curious balustrades of wrought 
iron, led up to the old panelled rooms on the first 
floor. And at once I felt that the past to which 
these things belonged was different from that of 
Saintonge and the island—the only part with 
which as yet I was at all familiar. 

After dinner we all went to sit by the brawling 
river, in a meadow among centaury and marjoram 
which even in the dark we knew by their pene- 
trating scent. It was very hot, very still, and 
myriads of crickets were chirping. I fancied I 
never had before seen a night so translucent, or so 


many stars crowded into so deep a blue. The 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 169 





difference in latitude was not, indeed, very great, 
but the sea-breezes, which make our winters mild, 
cast a haze over our summer-nights, so this sky 
was very likely clearer than that at home, more 
southern. 

All round, we were shut in by grey blue 
shapes rising into the air, and which I could never 
tire of gazing at. The mountains which I had 
never seen gave me that sense of abroadness I 
had so longed to feel, showing me that my first 
dream was indeed fulfilled. 

It was my fate to spend several summers in 
this little town and to become so familiar with it 
as to be able to speak the dialect of the good 
people of the place. The two homes of my child- 
hood were in fact Saintonge and this southern 
spot, both were warmed with sunshine. 

As for Brittany, which many persons suppose 
to be my birthplace, I never saw it till long after, 
when I was seventeen, and it was long before I 
loved it— the reason, perhaps, why I loved it 
more. At first it weighed on me with depressing 


sadness; it was my brother Ives who first initiated 


170 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





me into its melancholy charm and made me at 
home in its cottages and in its timber-built 
chapels. And, finally, the influence exerted on 
my imagination by a young girl of the Treguier 
district at a much later date, when I was about 
seven and twenty made me really love this adopted 


home. 


XLITI. 


N the day after my arrival at our southern 
Cousins’ I was introduced to some new 
play-fellows: the little Peyrals, who, after the 
manner of the country, had the article always 
prefixed to their names; they were la Maricette 
and /a Tztz, two little girls of ten and eleven — 
my companions were still little girls—and / 
Médou, a younger brother, almost a baby, who 
did not count. As I was on the whole very 
young for a boy of twelve —in spite of certain 
intuitions as to matters outside the ken, as a rule, 


of most children— we at once formed a most 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 171 





sympathetic little party, and our friendship per- 
sisted through several summers. 

The father of these little Peyrals was the 
owner of woods and vineyards on the hillsides, 
where we reigned supreme; no one interfered with 
our schemes, not even the most absurd. In this 
perfectly remote country-village, where our 
families were held in such high respect by the 
peasantry, it was supposed that we could come to 
no harm in our wanderings. So we set off, all 
four of us, early in the day for a picnic dinner 
in some distant vineyard, or in pursuit of undis- 
coverable butterflies, sometimes enlisting any 
little peasant children we met, for they were 
always ready to follow us submissively, and such 
freedom as this after the incessant watchfulness to 
which I had hitherto been accustomed, was to me 
a delightful change. A new life of independence 
and open air began for me among the mountains; 
but I might almost say it was a continuation of my 
isolation, for I was the eldest of the party and led 
them in my very fantastic games. Intellectually — 


in the realm of dreams, there were wide gulfs 


r72 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





between us. I was the undisputed head of the 
tribe; only Titi now and then rebelled and was 
immediately pacified; their one idea was, very 
sweetly, to please me, and it suited me very well 
to have the upper hand. This was the first time 
I had been a leader. I had other troops of fol- 
lowers in my amusements at a later time, and less 
easy to manage; but I always liked best that they 
should consist of my juniors— younger than 
myself in intelligence especially, and more simple- 
minded, neither interfering with my _ caprices, 


nor — above all— laughing at my childishness. 


XLIV. 


S a holiday task I had merely been desired to 
read 7¢lémaque — my education, it will be 
observed, had some old-world features. It was in 
a little eighteenth century edition, in several 
volumes. And, wonderful to say, it did not par- 
ticularly bore me; I had a clear vision of Greece 


and its white marbles under a pure blue sky; and 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE, 173 





my spirit unfolded itself to a conception of an- 
tiquity which was, no doubt, much more pagan 
than Fénelon’s: Calypso and her nymphs en- 
chanted me. 

To do my reading I withdrew from the little 
Peyrals for a few minutes every day, to one or 
another of two favorite nooks: the garden or the 
loft. 

This enormous loft, under the tall Louis XIII. 
roof, extended for the whole length of the house, 
the windows were always shuttered and the place 
always dark. Old relics of a past time sleeping 
up there under the dust and spider webs had at- 
tracted me from the first; and then I had got 
into the habit of stealing up there with my 7é/- 
maque, after the mid-day dinner, sure that no one 
would look for me there. At that hour of scorch- 
ing sunshine it was by comparison quite dark. I 
noiselessly set a shutter ajar, letting in a flood of 
blinding light. Then leaning out over the roof I 
rested my elbows on the hot old slates seamed 
with golden mosses, and read at my ease. Within 


reach of my hand thousands of Agen plums lay 


174 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





drying for winter use, spread out on reed mats; 
baked in the sun through and through, they were 
perfectly delicious; the whole loft was fragrant 
with them, and the bees and wasps which feasted 
on them as I did tumbled about on their backs 
surfeited with sweets and heat. And on every 
roof in the neighbourhood, among the ancient 
Gothic gables, similar reed mats were spread, 
as far as I could see, covered with just such 
plums and haunted by buzzing insects. 

I could also see from thence in sloping perspec- 
tive the two streets which met at the corner 
formed by my cousins’ house. The long rows of 
medieval houses ended, in each, in a Gothic gate- 
way in the high town-wall of red stone. The 
town was torpid, and hot, and silent in the hush 
of summer noon; not a sound was heard but the 
cackle of innumerable fowls and ducks, pecking 
the sun-dried rubbish in the streets below. 

I took my TZélémague in very small doses; 
three or four pages satisfied my curiosity and set 
my conscience at ease for the rest of the day; 
then I made haste down again to join my little 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 175 





friends, and we set out for the vineyards or the 
woods. 

The garden of which I spoke, whither I some- 
times retired, was not attached to the house; like 
all the other gardens it lay outside the Gothic 
walls of the townlet. It was enclosed by rather 
high walls and the entrance was through a door 
with a round arch, locked with a gigantic key. 
Sometimes I would go off there alone with my 
Télémaque and my butterfly net. 

There were plum-trees there from which those 
same delicious plums dropped, overripe, on the 
scorching soil; all along the old paths vines were 
pleached where legions of bees and flies devoured 
the scented grapes. And the further end lay 
waste — for it was very large — overgrown with 
lucerne like an open field. 

The charm of this old orchard was the feeling 
of solitude, of being locked in perfectly alone in 
the wide space and the silence. 

I must also mention a certain arbour which 
was there, in which two years later the crowning 


event of my child-life occurred. It was backed 


176 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


by the outer wall, and covered by a trellice and 
vine always baking in the sun. This place gave 
me, | know not precisely why, an impression of 
the tropics. — And in truth in our colonial garden- 
plots I really did find, at a later date, the same 
heavy scent and general aspect of things, This 
arbour was the occasional haunt of a rare kind of 
butterflies which I never found elsewhere; looked 
at from the front they were simply yellow and 
black, but a side glance showed them gorgeous 
with blue metallic lustre, just like those foreigners 
from Guiana which were to be seen, with pins 
-through, them, in my museum — uncle’s glass 
boxes. They were very distrustful and difficult 
to catch, hovering for an instant over the musk- 
scented grapes and then fitting away over the wall. 
Then setting my toes in the breaches of the wall, I 
dragged myself to the top to watch them disap- 
pear across the slumbering, silent country, and 
would rest there some time leaning on my elbows 
and contemplating the distance. All round me 
rose the wooded mountains, with here and there 


the ruins of a castle of feudal towers on a height; 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 177 








and in the foreground, surrounded by fields of 
maize and buckwheat, I saw the Domazn of Bortes 
with its old vaulted porch; the only house in the 
neighbourhood which was whitewashed, like the 
entrance to an African town. 

This place I was told, belonged to some chil- 
dren named Sainte-Hermangarde, who were to 
come soon and to be my playfellows; but I 
almost dreaded their advent, so thoroughly was I 


satisfied with the society of the little Peyrals. 


XLV. 


 oeshaeeeatilenatt This ancient name calls up 

for me images of sunshine of pure light on 

high hills, of calm melancholy among ruins, of 

devout meditation in the face of departed splen- 
dours, buried for ages. 

This old castle of Castelnau was perched on 

one of the neighbouring wooded heights, the rus- 


set pile of its terraces and ramparts, its towers 


I2 


178 A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 





and turrets standing out against the sky. It could 
be seen from my cousin’s old garden, its distant 
head peeping above the wall. 

It was indeed the most conspicuous object in 
the landscape for miles round, the one thing it was 
impossible to avoid seeing, the crenelated ridge of 
red masonry, rising up from among a dense clump 
of trees, a ruin set like a crown on a _ pedestal 
overgrown with the verdure of chestnuts and 
oaks. On the first day of my arrival I had caught 
sight of it at once, both surprised and attracted at 
this ancient eagle’s nest, which in those dark 
middle ages must have been so grand. And as it 
happened, it was a custom in the summer for all 
my cousin’s family to go up two or three times a 
month, to spend the day and dine with the owner 
—an old priest who lived in a comfortable little 
house hanging on to the ruins. 

Those were days of joy and fairy dreams for 
me. 

We set out, all together, early enough to have 
crossed the plain before the hottest hours of the 


day. As soon as we reached the foot of the 


A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 179 








mountain we felt the cool shade of the forest 
which was wrapped in a grand mantle of green. 
Then, under the vault of huge oaks and _ thick 
foliage we went up, up, by a zigzag path, all the 
family on foot in single file, a serpentine proces- 
sion like the pilgrims wending their way to the soli- 
tary abbeys on cliffs in Gustave Doré’s medizval 
landscapes. Here and there from under the ferns 
a tiny spring oozed out and trickled in a channel 
across the red soil; between the trees deep vistas 
peeped through the gaps. At last, on reaching 
the top, we were in the strangest and most old- 
world village, perched up there for ages; and we 
rang at the priest's little gate. His house and 
garden-plot were overhung by the castle with its 
chaos of red walls and towers, crumbling, riven 
and falling. The deepest peace seemed to emanate 
from this ruined eyrie, it breathed an immense 
silence, which lay, awful, on everything near. 
Very long were the dinners the good old priest 
used to give us; not unfrequently one of those 
southern ‘“feeds’’ to which the ‘notabilities of 


the neighbourhood were invited. Ten or fifteen 


180 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








dishes, one after another, with the choicest golden 
fruits and wines of the best vintages of that coun- 
try, then so richly productive. So we sat at table 
hour after hour in those hot August or September 
afternoons, and I, the only child of the party, 
could not endure it; haunted by the overpower- 
ing sense of the adjoining ruins, at the second 
course I asked leave to depart. Then an old 
woman would come out with me and open the 
outer door of the feudal walls of Castelnau; then 
she placed the keys of the immense place in my 
hands and I went on alone with delicious trepida- 
tions, knowing the way well enough through gates 
with drawbridges and up towering ramparts. 

Here I was then, alone for a long time, sure 
that no one would come after me for an hour or 
two; free to wander about this labyrinth, master 
in these high and melancholy precincts. Oh! The 
dreams I have had there ! — First I went round all 
the terraces overhanging the woods I looked down 
into ; infinite distances spread on every side of me, 
here and there in the distance rivers laced the 


scene with silver, and through the translucent 





ee a ee 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 181 








summer atmosphere I could see across to the 
neighbouring province. A great calm seemed to 
reign in this corner of France which lived its own 
little life, somewhat as in a bygone time, unvisited 
as yet by any railway line. 

Then I went into the interior of the ruin — 
the courtyards, the stairs, the deserted passages ; 
I climbed up into the towers, scaring flocks of 
pigeons, or rousing bats and owls from their noon- 
day slumbers. On the first floor there were suites 
of huge rooms, not yet unroofed, and very dark 
with closed shutters; where I used to wander in 
an ecstasy of fear, listening to the sound of my 
own steps in that sepulchral emptiness, studying 
the strange Gothic painting, and faded frescoes, or 
still faintly-gilt ornaments monsters and gar- 
lands of impossible flowers, added at the Renais- 
sance ; the whole telling of a past which rose up 
before me, wildly fantastic and savagely magnifi- 
cent, dim in a remote distance, and yet bright 
with the same southern sunshine as was now bak- 
ing these deserted red stone walls. Even now, 


when I can see Castelnau in a true light, looking 


182 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





at it in memory with eyes, which have seen some- 
thing of all that is most splendid on earth, I still 
think of that Enchanted Castle of my childhood 
as being, with its beautiful situation, one of the 
most sumptuous relics of feudal France. 

In one tower there was a certain room with a 
coffered ceiling in royal blue powdered with 
rosettes and badges in gold. — Nothing has ever 
given me such an intimate sense of medizvalism. 
In the midst of that silence as of the dead, with 
my elbows on the sill of a little window sunk in 
the thick wall, I gazed down on the green depths — 
trying to picture to mvself, on the roads so far 
below, cavalcades of men-at-arms, or processions 
of knights and ladies. To me, brought up amid 
level plains, one of the strangest charms of the 
place was the wide vacant blue of the distance 
which peeped through every crack, or loophole, 
or opening of any kind in the halls and towers, 
and which at once gave me a sense new to my ex- 


perience of being high, high, above the world. 








A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 183 





EVE: 


beatae from my brother on that very thin 

paper and written very close, used to reach 
us at irregular intervals as sailing vessels happened 
to arrive that had been cruising out there on the 
Great Ocean. Some of them were to me, very 
long ones too, with never-to-be-forgotten descrip- 
tions. I already knew several words of the soft- 
sounding language of Oceania, and in my dreams 
at night I often saw the Delicious Isle and wan- 
dered there. It haunted my fancy like a Happy 
Valley, ardently longed for, but quite inaccessible, 
in another planet. 

One of these letters, forwarded by my father, 
came to me while I was staying with these cousins 
in the south. 

I went up to the roof of the loft to read it, on 
the sunny side where the plums were drying. He 
gave me a long account of a place called Fatata, 


a deep ravine between two precipices: ‘ perpetual 


184 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





twilight reigned there under tall, unfamiliar trees, 
and the spray of waterfalls kept the rarest ferns 
forever green.” —Yes, I saw it all; and so much 
more clearly now that I, too, had mountains about 
me with damp dells full of ferns. The whole 
thing was described fully and completely; my 
brother had no suspicion of the dangerous witchery 
his letters already exercised over the child he had 
left so happy by the fireside, so quiet, so pious. 

“The only pity,” he added, ‘‘ was that the 
Delicious Isle should not have some little back 
door opening into our garden — into the honey- 
suckle arbour, for instance, behind the little 
pond.” 

This notion of a door in the wall of our 
garden-plot, and above all the connection with the 
little pool which my far-away brother himself had 
made, struck me strangely, and the next night 
this was my dream: 

I went into our garden. It was in a deadly 
twilight as if the sun had gone out forever; over 
everything and in the air there was the unuttera- 


ble desolation of dreams which when we are 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 185 





awake we cannot even conceive of. At the end 
of the garden, by that beloved little pool, I felt 
myself rise from the earth like a bird taking flight. 
At first I was tossed to and fro like some very 
light creature, and then I floated over the wall to 
the southwest in the direction of Oceania; I had 
no wings that I could see, and I was lying on my 
back in an agony of giddiness and fear of falling ; 
then I went on at a terrific speed, like a stone 
shot from a sling; the stars whirled madly about 
me in space; beneath me seas on seas were glid- 
ing away, pale and bewildering, and still in that 
twilight of a dying world. — Presently, suddenly, 
the great trees of the gorge of Fatata were 
closing over me in the dark. I was there. 

There, in that place I dreamed on; but I no 
longer believed in my dream — so completely was 
I aware of the impossibility of ever really being 
there. — Besides, I had too often been the dupe of 
such visions, which vanished with my slumbers. 


g, so bewitched was I with 


I only dreaded wakin 
this ineffectual illusion. The carpet of ferns was 


there; in the deep gloom I gathered them, feeling 


186 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


for them, and saying to myself: ‘‘ These plants, at 
any rate, must be real, since I can touch them, and 
have them in my hand; they surely cannot disap- 
pear wher Ivwake. 1." ‘And chitched= them: 
with all my might to be sure of holding them. 

I woke. The beautiful summer’s day was 
breaking; the clatter of life was beginning — 
the perpetual ‘chick and crooning of the hens 
already pecking about the streets, and the rattle of 
the weavers’ looms at once reminded me of where 
I was. My empty hand was still clenched, the 


nails almost set in the palm, to keep tight hold of 





the imaginary nosegay from Fatatia—the airy 


nothing of a dream. 
\ 


ALWA, 


HAD very soon become attached to my 
grown-up cousins, and as familiar with them 
as though I had known them all my life. I fancy 


that only the tie of blood avails to create these 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 187 





immediate intimacies between persons who the 
day before did not know of each other’s existence. 
I was very fond, too, of my uncle and aunt, as we 
called them; especially of my aunt who spoilt me 
a little and who was still very good and beautiful 
to behold, in spite of her sixty years and her grey 
hair, and her grandmotherly dress. She was a 
woman of a type which will soon be extinct in our 
day, when everything is being levelled and pared 
to one pattern. Born in the neighbourhood of her 
house, of a very old family, she had never quitted 
that province of France; her manners, her hos- 
pitality, her courtesy, had a local stamp, and that 
was a detail which attracted me. 

In total contrast to my narrow, padded life at 
home, here I lived entirely out of doors, in the 
roads and the streets. And these streets were 
strange and delightful to me, paved with black 
cobbles, like the streets in the East, and over- 
shadowed by old houses-— Gothic, or of the 
Louis XIII period. The women who went past, 
too, peasant women with goitres, as they came in 


from the fields and vineyards, with baskets of fruit 


188 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








on their heads, always would stop to offer me the 
ripest grapes and most delicious peaches. 

Then, too, I was delighted with the southern 
dialect, the mountaineers’ songs, all the foreign 


aspect of things which came upon me from all 


sides at once. To this day, when I happen to cast | 


my eye on some of the treasures I brought home 
for my little museum, or to come across one of the 
little letters I wrote every day to my mother, I 
seem suddenly to feel the sunshine, the new 
strangeness, the fruity fragrance of the South, the 
fresh mountain air—and I am conscious that in 
spite of my long descriptions these dead pages 


can reproduce nothing of it all. 


XLVIIL. 


7 gains little Sainte- Hermangardes, of whom I 

had heard-so much, arrived in the middle of 
September. Their home lay to the north, towards 
la Corréze; and they came every year to spend 


the autumn in a rambling, dismantled old house, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE 189 





next door to my cousins’. This time there were 
boys; two boys rather older than I. But in spite 
of my fears I liked them at once. They were 
accustomed to live during a large part of the year 
in the remote country on their own estate, and 
they had guns and gunpowder; they went out 
shooting. Thus they brought quite a new element 
into my games. Their grounds at Bories became 
one of our centres of operations. Everything 
there was at our command — servants, beasts, and 
buildings. And one of our amusements now at 
the end of the holidays, was to make enormous 
paper balloons, which we inflated by burning hay 
under them, and then sent sailing away, high up, 
till they were lost in the fields or the trees. 

But these children even were not quite like all 
others; they were brought up by a private tutor 
with different notions from those which prevail at 
a town-school. When there was any difference of 
opinion among us, each was ready to give way out 
of politeness; thus their society again, was ill- 
adapted to prepare me for the friction of life. 


One day they came — it was very sweet of 


190 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





them —to bring me a very rare butterfly, a 
variety of the sulphur-yellow which has on the 
front wings a lovely tinge of rosy orange, like the 
flush of dawn. It was at Bories, they told me, 
that they had caught it, and with so much care 
that there was not a finger-mark on its delicate 
tints. And just as they brought it, at noon, in the 
hall of the old house, which was always closely 
shut up during the day, to exclude the oppressive 
heat, my old cousin might be heard behind the 
scenes, singing in a thin, plaintive mountain 
falsetto. He was fond of pitching his voice in 
this tone, and at that moment it struck me with 
peculiar melancholy in the silent heat of the late 
September noon. And again and again it was the 
same old song: ‘‘ Ah/ ah! la bonne histotre. . .” 
which he began and never finished. So from that 
moment the house at Bories, the sulphur butterfly, 
and the doleful little tune of ‘“‘/a donne histotre,” 
remained inseparably linked in my mind. 

But, indeed, I am saying too much about these 
incoherent associations of images which I was 


so apt to form; this is the last time; I will do so 


a 


A CHILD'S ROMANCE. Igt 





no more. But in the sequel it will be seen that 
it was important to record this one with reference 


to what follows. 
eo view 


E returned home in the beginning of October. 

But a disastrous event marked our return: 

I was sent to school—as a day-boy of course; 

and equally of course, I never was allowed to 

go or come alone for fear of mischief. My school- 

life, as it turned out, was limited to four years of 

day-schooling, the freest and most whimsical that 
can be imagined. 

Nevertheless, from that fatal day my little 
story was very much spoilt. 

School began at half-past two on one of those 
delicious days in October — warm and calmly 
sunny, which are like a sad farewell from the 
summer. It had been so lovely among the moun- 
tains, the leafless forests, the russet vines! I first 
entered on the scene of durance as one of a swarm 


of children all talking together. My first impres- 


192 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





sion was one of surprise and disgust at the hideous 
bareness of the ink-splashed walls and the shiny 
old forms of worn wood, all patterned with pen- 
knife-carving, where at once one felt how many 
school-boys had been victimized. My new com- 
panions, though unknown to me, treated me with 
patronizing or impertinent familiarity from the 
first; I, on my side, gazed at them shyly, think- 
ing them very rude, and for the most part, very 
dirty. 

I was twelve and a half, and was placed in the 
third class; my home tutor having said that I was 
capable of the work if I took pains, though my 
little stock of knowledge was very unequal. That 
first day we all had to write a Latin exercise, to 
place us in the class, and I remember that my 
father was waiting for me _ himself, somewhat 
anxious as I came out of this triai-day. I told 
him I was second of fifteen, astonished at his at- 
taching so much importance to a matter in which 
I took so little interest. It was quite the same to 
me. Heart-broken as I was how could I care for 


such a trifle ? 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 193 





And even later emulation remained unknown 
tome. To beat the bottom of his class always 
seemed to me the least of the evils a school-boy 
has to endure. 

The weeks as’ they followed were utterly 
miserable. In fact, my intelligence shrank before 
the multiplicity of exercises and tasks; even my 
own little dreamland seemed to be fading into 
nothingness. The first fogs, the first grey days, 
added their desolate gloom to it all. The Savoy- 
ard sweeps had come back to the towns, with 
their autumnal cry, which in bygone years had 
touched my heart and moved me to tears. To 
children the approach of winter brings unreason- 
able forebodings of the end of all things, of death 
in cold and darkness; time seems so long at that 
age, that they fail to look foward to the revival 
which will come to all. It is not till we are well 
on in life, and ought on the contrary, to think 
more of the lapse of seasons, that we think of a 
winter as a mere trifle. 

I had a calendar in which I marked off the 
days one by one. At the beginning of this year 

13 


194 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








of school-life I felt quite crushed by the long per- 
spective of months—interminable months, through 
which I must live before even the Easter holi- 
days—a respite of a week from dulness and 
discomfort; I had no courage—sometimes I 
really sank into despair at the slow crawling lapse 
of time. 

Ere long cold, bitter cold, came to aggravate 
matters. Oh! that arrival at school on December 


mornings, when for two mortal hours we had to 


sit in a room warmed by a smoky sea-coal fire, 
and when the icy wind in the streets must be 
faced to get home again. Other boys skipped 
and jumped, and knew how to make slides when 
the gutters were frozen. I knew none of these 
things, and they would have struck me as highly 
incorrect. I was escorted home, walking nicely 
and chilled to the marrow; humiliated too at being 
fetched, laughed at sometimes by the others, not 
popular with my class and somewhat disdainful of 
my fellow-captives, with whom I had not a single 
idea in common. 


Then on Thursdays my tasks went on all day, 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 195 








with “impositions ’’— ridiculous impositions — 
which I scrawled off in the vilest writing possible 
by the help of every school-boy trick — blotting 
off duplicates and tying pens five ina row. And 
in my disgust at life I did not even keep myself 
tidy ; I was constantly in trouble for rough hair 
and dirty hands—ink-stained only of course. 
But if I were to go on I should make my narrative 
the mirror of all the deadly weariness of those 


days. 


L. 


‘6 AKES, cakes, nice cakes, all hot!” The 

worthy old woman had begun her even- 
ing walks again, her quick, shuffling pace and dole- 
ful tune. She hurried by at the same hour every 
day with the regularity of an automaton. And 
so the long winter evenings had come again, just 
like those of many years already past and of two 
or three yet to come. Every Sunday at eight 
o'clock the D***’s would arrive with Lucette, 


196 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





and some other neighbours with a very little girl 
named Marguerite, who had lately become inti- 
mate in the house. A new game had been de- 
vised for the close of these winter Sunday even- 
ings, over which the thought of the morrow’s 
lessons weighed more sadly than ever. After tea, 
when I knew that the end was near and that they 
would be going away, I carried off this little Mar- 
guerite into the dining-room and we set to run- 
ning round and round the table like mad things, 
trying which could catch the other in a sort of 
frenzy. She was caught at once, of course, 
and I hardly ever; so she was always the pur- 
suer, and most vehement; slapping the table, 
and shouting, and making a really infernal racket. 
By the time we had done, the rugs were turned 
up, the chairs out of place, everything topsy- 
turvy. We found it very dull —and I was 
indeed too old for such play. In point of fact 
there was nothing in the world more dismal to 
me than these final romps on Sunday, with the 
terror of Monday hanging over me and the weary 


round of tasks once more. It was merely a way 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 197 





of prolonging zz extremis this day of truce; of 
stunning my woes by sheer noise. It was a sort 
of challenge flung in the face, as it were, of those 
never-done tasks, which were a burden to my 
conscience and would presently trouble my dreams, 
which I must scramble through somehow next 
morning in my bed-room, by candle-light or in 
the dim frozen dawn, before the hateful hour of 
school once more. 

The family in the drawing-room were, to be 
sure, somewhat dismayed at hearing this bac- 
chanalian riot; and yet more at finding that I 
preferred it to playing duets or quiet drawing- 
room games, 

This melancholy race round the dining-room 
table was fepeated every Sunday evening, just at 
half-past ten, for two winters certainly. School 
was doing me no good, that was clear, and much 
less were impositions of any avail. All this dis- 
cipline had come too late and from the wrong side ; 
it crushed me, extinguished and stultified me. 
Even from the point of view of friction with other 


boys of my own age the object aimed at had been 


198 _ A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





‘most effectually missed. If I had ever shared in 
their sports and squabbled, perhaps indeed... 
But I never saw them, excepting in school, under 
the master’s rod, and that was not enough. I had 
grown up a too peculiar little creature to be able 
to catch anything of their manners, consequently 
I was only confirmed and strengthened in my own. 
They were most of them older and more forward 
than I was, more wide awake, too, and far more 
practically knowing; hence they felt a sort of hos- 
tile pity for me which I returned in scorn, well 
aware how incapable they would be of following 
me in the wide flights of my imagination. 

I had never felt any pride among the peasant 
children of the island or of the mountains; we 
met on the common ground of rather primitive 
simplicity and extreme childishness. I had often 
played with them as my equals; but with these 
school-boys I did feel pride, and they regarded 
me as full of airs and affectations. It took many 
years to cure me of this kind of haughtiness and 
to come down simply to my level in the world; 


many years before I understood that a man is in 





a 


_ A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 199 








— 


no respect superior to his kind, because, to his 
sorrow, he may be a prince or a magician in the 


world of dreams. 


LI. 


HE theatre— Peau d’Ane—very much en- 
larged, with a great number of scenes, was 
now set up permanently in Aunt Claire’s rooms. 
Jeanne, more interested in it since these new ad- 
ditions were made, came frequently; she would 
paint backgrounds under my instructions, and I 
enjoyed the moments when I could assert my 
authority. We had now a reserve stock-box, full 
of little personages, each fitted with a name anda 
part, and regiments of monsters, bogies and 
gnomes for the fairy processions, all modelled in 
plaster and painted in water-colour. 
I remember our joy, our enthusiasm, the day 
when we first tried a grand semicircular back scene, 
which represented “Space.” Little rose-colored 


clouds, lighted from one side, hovered’ in front of 


* 


200 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


an expanse of blue, softened by gauze hangings, 
and a silken-haired fairy moved forward in the 
midst in a car drawn by a pair of butterflies, held 
up by invisible threads. 

Still nothing ever came of it all because we 
could never set any bounds to our aspirations. 
Every day some new idea surged up, some more 
astounding scheme; and the great dress rehearsal 
was postponed from month to month, to some im- 
probable future. 

Every undertaking in my life will share, or 


has shared, the fate of the play. 


LII. 


Ge a all the masters who so cruelly ill-used 

me during my school life—and who all 
had their nicknames — by far the worst no doubt 
were the ‘Bull-Apis’ and the ‘Great black Ape.’ 
I hope that if they should happen to read this 
they will understand how entirely I have taken up 


my childish point of view to write it. If I met 








A CHIILD’S ROMANCE. 201 





them now I should go up to them with hand ex- 
tended and apologize for having been so refrac- 
tory a pupil. 

The Great Ape especially, how I hated him! 
When from his raised seat he would pronounce 
these words: ‘“‘ You will write out a hundred lines, 
you —that little milksop there,’ I could have 
flown at his face like an indignant cat. It was he 
who first aroused in me those bursts of sudden 
violence which have characterised me as a man, 
and which nothing foretold in the child, for I was, 
on the contrary, patient and gentle. 

Still, it is not fair to say that I was on the 
whole a bad learner; unequal rather, with unex- 
- pected turns; one day at the top and at the 
bottom the next, but keeping up to a fair average 
and always at the end of the year carrying off the 
translation prizes. No others, that is very certain, 
and I only wondered that every one did not win 
them, the work seemed to me so easy. Composi- 
tions on the other hand I found desperately diffi- 
cult, and in the form of a narrative doubly hard. 


I deserted my own little room almost entirely ; 


202 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





it was in Aunt Claire’s, under the shadow of the 


sugar-plum bear, that I was most resigned to the 


torment of lessons; on the wall, in a hidden 
corner of that panelled room a portrait may still 
be seen of the ‘Great black Ape;’ a sketch in 
pen and ink, with other fancy pictures of various 
worthies. The ink has faded and turned yellow, 
but the work of art remains intact; and when I 
look at it I feel once more the mortal weariness, 
the freezing oppression —in short the very 
atmosphere of school. 

Aunt Claire was more than ever my friend 
and stand-by in these hard times, looking out the 
words in the dictionary and even condemning 
herself not unfrequently to write my impositions 
for the Grand Ape, in a feigned hand. 


LITI. 


— «¢.QRING me, please, the second... No, 
the third drawer of my chiffonnier.” 


It is mamma who is speaking, amusing her- 


ee a 4 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 203 





self with the drawers which she has asked me to 
fetch every day for ever so many years, — some- 
times for the pleasure of asking me to get them 
without really wanting them in the least. It was 
one of the first services that as a little child I was 
able to do for her; to take her one or other as 
the case might be, of those miniature drawers, 
and the tradition remained for a long time. 

At the time in my life about which I am now 
writing, it was generally in the evening, after my 
return from school, that this little walk with the 
drawers took place, in the dusk ; mamma is seated 
in her usual place, talking or working near the 
window, her work-basket before her; and the 
chiffonnier from the different divisions of which, 
she from time to time requires something, is at 
some little distance, in the ante-room. A chif- 
fonnier of Louis XV. period, venerable because it 
belonged to our great-grandmothers. In it there 
were some very old little painted wooden boxes, 
touched no doubt every day by our ances- 
tresses’ fingers. I need hardly say that I knew 


all the secrets of the various divisions, kept in 


204 A CHILD’S. ROMANCE. 


the same immovable order; there is a story for 
silks, classified in little ribbon bags; there is one 
for needles, one for narrow tapes, and another for 
little hooks. And the arrangement of these 
things is I doubt not the same as was made by 
the ancestresses whose saintly activity my mother 
still imitates. 

To bring one of the drawers of this chiffonnier, 
was one of the joys, the prides of my early child- 
hood, and nothing in their organization has 
changed since that day. They have ever inspired 
me with the tenderest respect; and are indisso- 
lubly connected in my mind with the image of 
my mother, and all the pretty little things, that 
her kind hands so dexterously made — including 
her last piece of embroidery which was a hand- 
kerchief for me. 

Towards my seventeenth year, after terrible 
reverses — at a troubled period, which I shall not 
include in this book, but which I. may as well 
mention, as I have already in former chapters 
touched upon the future — I was obliged for some 


months, to consider the terror of parting from my 





q 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 205 





ancestral home and all the precious treasures it 
contained; then in the moments when I reviewed 
in mournful contemplation all that I valued and 
which was to be torn from me, one of my most 
bitter agonies was the thought: “I shall never 
again see the ante-room where the chiffonnier 
stands, never again carry those beloved drawers 
tomy. mother.;...)2° Pi 

And her work-basket, the very same one I 
begged her never to change, in spite of its being 
a little the worse for wear —and the various little 
knick-knacks it contained, cases, needle-boxes, 
winders and screws for her embroidery frame ! — 
The idea that a time will come when the dear 
hands which make daily use of these things, will 
no longer do so, fills me with a dread, against 
which I fight in vain. Certainly as long as I live, 
everything will be left just as it is, and held as 
sacred; but after me, who will inherit this un- 
appreciated heir-loom; what will become of these 
poor little trifles I love so much? 

My mother’s work-basket and the drawers of 


the chiffonnier, are what I shall leave with most 


206 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





grief and regret, when I am called to quit this 
world. 

Very childish, I must confess, and I am quite 
ashamed of myself; — nevertheless I am almost 


on the verge of tears as I write it... . 


. LIV. 


\ X JITH the ever increasing worry of lessons, I 


had ceased for some months to read my 


Bible, I hardly had time in the mornings to say 


my prayers. 

I still went to church very regularly on Sun-. 
day ; indeed, we all went together. I had a great 
respect for the family pew, which had belonged 
to us for such a long time, and that place will 
always have a particular connection in my mind 
with my mother. 

It was in church, however, that my faith was 
constantly receiving the severest shocks; those of 
coldness and boredom. Generally commentaries 


and human reasonings diminished the value of the 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 207 








Bible and gospels, took away some of their grand 
solemn and sweet poetry. It was then very diffi- 
cult to touch on such subjects to such a young 
mind as mine, without destroying them. It was 
only the family worship every evening that car- 
ried any religious conviction to me, but then the 
voices which read and prayed were dear to me, 
which made all the difference. 

And then my continual contemplation of the 
works of nature, my meditations on the fossils of 
the cliffs and mountains, contained in my mu- 
seum, gave birth in my innermost self to a vague 
unconscious pantheism. 

Indeed, my faith still deeply rooted and lively 
as it was, was then in a state of torpor, from 
which at times it was capable of being roused, but 
which under ordinary circumstances annulled its 
effect. Moreover I felt a difficulty about saying 
my prayers; my scrupulous conscience was never 
easy when I knelt down—on account of my 
luckless tasks, always more or less shirked, and 
on account of my rebeliions against the Bull-Apis 
or the Grand Ape, which I was obliged to hide, 


208 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








to disguise sometimes till I shuddered at the 
falsehood. I felt acute remorse for all this, and 
had periods of moral distress, to escape which I 
rushed more than ever into noisy games and 
senseless laughter, at the moment when my con- 
science was more particularly tender, not daring 
to face my parents’ gaze I took refuge with the 
servants, and played tennis with them or skipped 
or romped, 

For two or three years now, I had given up 
talking about my religious vocation; I knew now 
that that was at an end, had become an impossi- 
bility; but I had found nothing else to take its 
place. And when strangers asked what I was 
going to be, my parents, who were anxious 
about my future, did not know what to reply, 
still less did I.... 

Meanwhile my brother, who also was think- 
ing of that illegible future, one day started the 
idea—in one of those letters which always smelt 
to me of far-off, enchanted countries—that the 
best thing would be to make me an engineer, on 


account of a certain accuracy of mind, a certain 





A CHILD'S ROMANCE. 209 








facility for mathematics, which was a queer 
anomaly in nature like mine. And after I had 
been consulted, and had replied carelessly: “I 
am quite willing, it is all the same to me,” the 
thing seemed decided. 

This time, during which it was intended that 
I should go to the Polytechnic school, lasted for 
rather more than a year. There or elsewhere, 
what did it matter? When I looked at the men 
‘of a certain age who surrounded me, even those 
who occupied the most honourable positions, the 
most justly respected, whom I could hope to imi- 
tate, and said to myself: ‘‘One day I shall be 
like them, live a useful steady life z7 a given place, 
in a determined sphere, and then grow old, that is 
all”” —I was seized with a nameless despair; I 
wished for nothing that was either possible or 
reasonable ; I longed more than ever to remain 
always a child, and the thought that years were 
fleeting, and that in spite of everything I must 


soon be a man, was unspeakably agonizing. 


14 


210 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


Pe 


WICE a week, in the history class, I was 
thrown together with the naval students, 

who wore red belts to give themselves a sailor- 
like air, and who drew anchors and boats in 


their school-books. 


I had never thought of the sea as my own’ 


calling; once or twice at most the idea had 
crossed my mind but with a sense of uneasiness. 
And yet it was the only profession which could 
have the attraction of voyages and adventure ; 
only it alarmed me more than any other on 
account of the long periods of exile which my 
faith would no longer help me to endure, as in 
the days when I had meant to be a missionary. 
To go away like my brother; to leave my 
mother and all I loved for years; never, for years 
to see my dear little garden grow green in the 
spring, and the roses blossom on the old walls ;— 


no, I had not courage enough for that. 


— 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 211 





All the more because it seemed to me, no 
doubt as a result of my peculiar education, a fore- 
gone conclusion that so rough a life could never 
be mine. And I knew too, from words that had 
been spoken in my hearing, that if ever such a 
wild idea should come into my head my parents 


would utterly refuse, never, on any terms consent. 


LVI. 


ERY home-sick now were the feelings I found 

in my museum when I| went up there in the 
winter half-holidays after finishing my tasks and 
‘impositions ’— always rather late. The light 
was fading by that time, and the glimpse I got of 
the distant level was veiled by a rosy gray haze, 
sad beyond words. My home-sickness was for 
the summer, for the sun and the South; and it 
was brought on by the sight of all the butterflies 
from my uncle’s garden pinned in rows under 
glass, and of all the mountain fossils, picked up 


out there with the little Peyrals. This was a 


212 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

foretaste of those regrets for ‘somewhere ’— any- 
where — which in later years after my long 
voyages in the tropics, spoiled my return home 
in the winter season. 

And above all the orange-sulphur butterfly ! 
There were times when I found a bitter joy in 
gazing at it, in dwelling on the melancholy it 
roused in me, and trying to understand it. It 
was in one of the back cases; its too bright and 
strangely contrasted hues, like those of a Chinese 
painting or a fairy’s robe, each heightened by the 
other, seemed almost luminous when grey twi- 
light fell, and the other butterflies near it looked 
no better than dingy little bats. 

As soon as my eye fell on it, I could hear the 
drawling, sleepy tune in the peculiar mountain- 
treble: “Ak, ah, la bonne histotre /’ and I could 
see the white porch of the house at Bories, in 
the sunlit silence of summer noons. <A dreadful 
regret would come over me for those past holi- 
days; I sadly counted back the long days since 
they were past, and the longer time to the holli- 


days to come; and then other feelings for which 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 2r5 





there were no words would crowd in, rising up 
from the unsounded inner depths and mingling in 
a strange whole. 

This association of the butterfly, the song, 
and Bories, for a long time caused me fits of — 
melancholy which nothing that I can write will 
ever express; and this went on till the great 
storm swept over my life carrying away most 
of these memories of my childhood. 

Sometimes in the calm grey winter evenings, 
as I looked at the butterfly, I would go so far 
as to sing the plaintive little air, in the flute-like 
pipe proper to it; and then the house at Bories 
rose up before my eyes even more distinctly, 
sunny but deserted in a September morning; it 
was something of the same kind which afterwards 
impressed on me the association of the wailing 
treble of Arab songs with the whiteness of their 
mosques— the winding-sheets of whitewash in 
which they wrap their gateways. 

That butterfly is still there, in all the sheen 
of its two singular hues, mummified in its glass- . 


case, just as bright as ever. It is to me a sort 


214 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





of fetich to which I am greatly attached. The 
little Sainte- Hermangardes, — of whom I lost 
sight many years ago and who are now attachés 
to some Eastern embassy — will be greatly 
surprised, if they should read this, to learn 


how precious circumstances have made their gift. 


LV. 


HE great event of these winters, prisoned as 
they were now by school-life, was the fes- 

tival of New Year’s gifts. By the end of Novem- 
ber we three —my sister, Lucette and I — were 
in the habit of publishing a list of the things 
we wished for. Everybody in the two families 
prepared surprises for us, and the mystery in _ 
which those presents were wrapped was my 
chief amusement during the last days of the 
year. My parents, grandmother and aunts de- 
lighted in exciting my curiosity by constant 


hints among themselves, and whisperings which 








A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 215 
they affected to break off as soon as I came 
into the room. 

Between Lucette and me it became quite a 
game of guessing As in playing, “ How, when 
and where,” there were certain questions we 
allowed each other — for instance so absurd an 
inquiry as: ‘‘ Has it hairs like a beast?” And 
the answers would be something to this effect: 
“The thing your father is going to give you 
had hairs but has lost them (a leather dressing- 
case), but it has false hair on part of its inside 
(the brushes). What your mamma will give 
you has some still (a muff), What your aunt 
will give you will help you see them, but I don’t 
think — stay —no, I don’t think it has any of 
its own (a lamp). 

Through the dusk hours of December, as we 
sat on low stools, in front of the blazing oak logs, 
this was the catechism we carried on, more 
eagerly every day till the 31st, the great even- 
ing of unveiled mysteries. 

That evening all the presents from and for 


both families were addressed and placed on the 


216 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








tables in a room which Lucette and I were for- 
bidden to enter all day. At eight o’clock the 
door was opened and every one admitted in a 
crowd, the grandparents first, each one seeking 
his own in the pile of paper parcels tied up with 
ribbon. To me the joy of that moment was such 
that even when I was twelve or thirteen I could 
not refrain from cutting capers at the door before 
I was let in. 

At eleven o’clock we had supper; and then, 
when the dining-room clock, with its calm un- 
moved tinkle, struck twelve, we went to bed, 
during those first minutes of the far away years 
buried under the dust of so many successors. 

I went to sleep with all my treasures in my 
room, with the most precious of them on the bed. 
And I woke earlier than usual next morning to 
look at them; they cast an enchantment over 
the winter’s dawn, the first of a new year. 

Once, there was among the number a large 
book full of prints, and treating of the antedilu- 
vian world. Fossils had already initiated me 


into the mystery of wrecked creations. I knew 


A CHILD’s ROMANCE. 217 
several of the ponderous beasts which in geolog- 
ical eras had shaken the primeval forests with 
their heavy tread; I had been thinking about 
them for a long time —and here I found them 
all in their habitat, under the leaden sky, among 
the tall tree-ferns. 

_ The antediluvian world, which already floated 
in my imagination, became the frequent theme of 
my imaginings; I often tried by concentrating 
my fancy, to call up a picture of some monstrous 
landscape, in the same gloomy twilight with dark 
distances; then, when the image thus evoked had 
become as real as a vision, it gave rise to an ex- 
treme and nameless dejection, as if it were breath- 
ing forth its soul—and that was the end —it 
vanished. 

It was not long before I had sketched a new 
scene for Pean ad’ Ane, representing a landscape of 
the Lias: adismal swamp in a half-light shrouded 
by banks of clouds, where the beasts of the past 
prowled among tree-ferns and mares’-tails. But 
indeed Peau d’Ane had by this time lost its 
identity. I had by degrees given up the actors 


218 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








whose intolerable fixity as dolls had ceased to in- 
terest me; they were sleeping already, poor little 
things, in their boxes from which no doubt they 
will never be exhumed. My new scenes had 
nothing whatever to do with the piece; they 
were glades in virgin-forests, exotic gardens, 
oriental palaces of gold and mother-of-pearl — all 
my dreams, in short, which I strove to realize 
with the small means at my command while 
waiting for better, the improbable “better” of the 
future. 


LNIrT. 


EANWHILE, after this wretched winter 

| spent under the auspices of the “ Bull- 
Apis” and the Grand-Ape, the spring returned, 
a fever in the blood of school-boys who long to 
be out and about, who can scarcely sit still and 
who are beside themselves at the first warm days. 
The roses were budding all over our old walls; 


my dear little garden was as tempting as ever in 








A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 219 





the March sunshine, and I lingered late there 
watching the insects awake and the first butter- 
flies and bees take wing. Even my theatre was 
forgotten. 

I was no longer taken to school and fetched 
away; I had succeeded in abrogating that cus- 
tom which made me ridiculous in the eyes of 
my companions. And on my way home I 
would often make a little round by the quiet 
ramparts, whence I could see the villages beyond 
and a glimpse of the country in the distance. 
But I worked more carelessly than ever that 
spring; the lovely weather turned my brain. 

One of the exercises in which I most igno- 
miniously failed was certainly French composi- 
tion; I had nothing to show but the bare canvas 
without the faintest attempt at embroidery. 
There was one boy in the class who was a master 
in this style and whose great works were always 
read aloud. Oh what beautiful things he could 
find to stuff in, to be sure!— He became the 
most prosaic of officials in a little manufacturing 


town. One day, the theme being, ‘“ A Ship- 


220 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





wreck,” he had hit on a lyric flow! — while I had 
given in a blank sheet with the title and my name 
signed. I could not make up my mind to elabor- 
ate the subjects set us by the Great-Ape; a sort 
of instinctive decency kept me from fluent com- 
monplace, and as to writing what I really felt, 
the notion of its being read and mangled by that 
ogre stopped that entirely. 

Still, I was even then fond of writing, for 
myself alone and under a shroud of inviolable 
mystery. Not in the desk in my room which was 
desecrated by my school-books and exercises, 
but in the little old desk which formed part of the 
furniture of my museum there was a quaint docu- 
ment which stood for a diary in my first manner. 
It looked like some fairy manuscript or Assyrian 
roll. An endless strip of paper was rolled round 
a reed; at the beginning were two Egyptian- 
looking sphinxes in red ink, and a cabalistic star ; 
and then it began, written in a cryptogram of my 
own invention. It was not till a year after this 
that I adopted ordinary writing because the elab- 
orate cypher took so long, but I still kept it 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE 221 


~ hidden, locked up as if it were acrime. In this, 
beyond the events of my very uneventful life, I 
only noted my incoherent impressions, my even- 
ing melancholy, my grieving over past summers 
and dreams of distant lands. I already felt that 
craving to make such notes, to fix these fugitive 
images, to struggle against the evanescence of 
things and of myself, which has made me keep 
my journal regularly down to these later years. 
But at that time the mere idea that any one 
should ever set eyes on it was intolerable to. me; 
to such a point that whenever I went any little 
journey—to the island, or elsewhere—I always 
took care to seal it up and write solemnly on the 
wrapper: “It is my last desire that this book 
should be burnt unread.” 

Dear Heaven! I have changed since then.— 
But it would be quite outside the limits of this 
story of my childhood to give any account here 
of the chances and changes which have led me 
rather to proclaim my woe ahd declare it to those 
who pass by, to attract the sympathy of the un- 


known and remote;— aye, and to cry all the 


222 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





louder as I feel myself nearer to the final dust. 
But, who knows, as I go on in life I may yet 
perhaps write of matters which could not now be 
wrung from me, and that merely to prolong, be- 
yond my own span, some memory of what I have 


been, of all I have mourned and loved. 


LIX. 


“T*HAT very spring an impressive event was 

the return from sea of Jeanne’s father. 
This struck me greatly. For days his house was 
in a state of confusion from the preparations and 
joy over his expected arrival. And the frigate 
he commanded having come into port a little 
sooner than it was looked for, I saw him from 
my window one fine evening walking home alone, 
hastening up the street to take his family by sur- 
prise. He came frem some distant colony after 
two or three years’ absence, and he did not seem 
to me to have altered.—Then one could come 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 222 





home unchanged ; those years of exile really had 
an end; they already began to seem shorter than 
I had formerly thought them. My brother, too, 
would return next autumn. We should soon feel 
as if we had never parted. 

And what a joy such a return must be! What 
a glory seemed to shroud those who had come 
from so far. 

Next day, in Jeanne’s garden, I saw enor- 
mous foreign cases being unpacked ; some were 
wrapped in tarpaulin, pieces of old sails no doubt, 
full of the fresh fragrance of ships and the sea; 
two sailors in their blue collars were busy un- 
cording and unscrewing them, and they took out 
of them mysterious-looking objects which smelt 


’ 


of “the colonies:” mats, and water jars, and 
vases; even some coconuts and other foreign 
fruits. Jeanne’s grandfather, himself an old 
sailor, was standing by me watching the unpack- 
ing out of the corner of his eye, when suddenly 
from between the boards of a case which they 
were breaking open, we saw some horrid brown 


beetles crawl out in a great hurry; whereupon 


224 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





the sailors jumped upon them with both feet te 
kill them. 

‘Cockroaches, eh, captain ?’’ I asked of the 
grandfather. 

“So you know them do you, little land- 
lubber ?” said he, laughing. 

To tell the truth I had never seen one, but 
uncles of mine who had lived in their society had 
told me about them. And I was delighted at 
my first introduction to these creatures which be- 
long so essentially to hot countries and ship- 
board. 


| Wi 


PRING! Spring! On the garden walls the 
white roses were in bloom, the jasmine, the 
honeysuckles, hanging in long garlands of deli- 
cious fragrance. 
I lived there again now from morning till 
night; lived there with the plants and the old 


stones, listening to the plash of water under the 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 225 








great plum-tree, examining the grasses and wood- 
land mosses which had lost their way and estab- 
lished themselves on the edge of my pool, or 
on the opposite side where the sun shone, count- 
ing the buds on the cactus. My Wednesday eve- 
ning journeys to /a Limozse had begun again too, 
and I dreamed of nothing else, I need hardly say, 
from week’s end to week’s end, to the great neg- 


lect of my lessons and exercises. 


LXE 


REALLY believe that the spring of that year 
was the most brilliant, the most heady of all 
the springs of my childhood; in contrast no 
doubt with the miserable winter over which the 
Grand-Ape had loomed a tyrant. Ah! the last 
days of May with the deep grass, and the mow- 
ing and hay-making of June! In what a golden 
glory I see it all again. 
My evening walks with my father and sister 


15 


226 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








continued throughout the early years of my life; 
they used to come and wait for me at half-past 
four, when I came out of school, and we set off 
at once for the fields. Our particular fancy that 
year was for certain meadows full of pink cam- 
pion, and I always brought home sheaves of 
these flowers. In the same meadows an ephem- 
eral race of little pink and black butterflies had 
come to life, and the same pink as the campion, 
which rested on the tall stems, and fluttered 
away like flower-petals blown-off, as we stirred 
the hay grass. I see it all again in the exqui- 
sitely limpid atmosphere of June. At afternoon 
class the thought of the wide fields waiting for 
me out there, disturbed me even more than the 
soft breeze and spring odours which came in at 
the open windows. 

I remember best of all one evening when my 
mother had promised that she too, for a great 
treat, would come for a walk to see the fields of 
pink campion. On that occasion, having been 
more inattentive than usual, the Grand-Ape had 


threatened to keep me in, and all through the 


er 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 227 





lesson I fancied I was going to be punished. 
This keeping in of an evening, which detained us 
in school for an hour longer in the delicious June 
weather, was always a cruel torment. But that 
day especially my heart was full, at thinking that 
mamma would be waiting for me and that the 
springs were so short, and that the hay would 
soon be cut, and that such another lovely evening 
might not shine on us this year. 

Lessons being over I anxiously examined the 
fateful list in the monitor’s hand. My name was 
not on it! The Grand-Ape had forgotten me or 
been merciful. 

Oh! my joy, asI ran out of school, at find- 
ing mamma who had kept her word, and who was 
waiting for me smiling, with my father and sister. 
The air outside was more delicious than ever, 
warm and odorous, and the light had a tropical 
glory. When I recall that time, those fields of 
wild flowers, those pink butterflies, a sort of 
indefinable anxiety mingles with my fond regret, 
as it always does when I conjure up the things 


which have struck and enchanted me by some 


228 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





mysterious nether current, and I cannot account 


for its intensity. 


LXIT. 


S I have said, I was always very young of 
my age. If I could be set face to face, 
just as I was then, with some of the youth of 
Paris, of thirteen and fourteen, brought up on 
the most improved and modern methods, who 
can already recite and speechify, and have 
notions on politics, and petrify me by their 
conversations, how funny it would be and how 
they would scorn me. 

Indeed, I myself am surprised at the amount 
of childishness which still clung to me in certain 
points; for, in spite of a lack of method and of 
acquirements, in matters of art and fancy I went 
further and soared higher than I do now, there 
is no question; and if that scrawl rolled on a 


reed of which I spoke just now, were still in 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 229 
existence it would have twenty times the value 
of these pale reminiscences, on which, as it seems 


to me, ashes are already strewn. 


LXIII. 


Y room, into which I never went now to do 
my tasks, rarely, indeed, excepting at night 
to sleep, became to me a scene of delight again 
during the long warm twilights of this lovely 
June, after dinner was over. I had invented 
a game for myself, a sort of improved tip-cat, 
and this amused me in an extraordinary de- 
gree; I was never tired of it. It would amuse 
me just as much to this day if I dared do it, 
and I can only hope that my game may find 
imitators among all the children who are im- 
prudently permitted to read this chapter. 
Thus it was: just opposite me and on the 
first floor, dwelt a good old maid known as 


Mademoiselle Victoire, with great old-fashioned 


230 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





cap-borders and large round spectacles. I had 
obtained her permission to fix a line of pack- 
thread to the peg that fastened back her shutter, 
and the other end was wound round a stick in 
my room on the other side of the street. 

In the evening, as it grew dusk, a bird of my 
own construction —a sort of blundering crow 
made of wire with black silk wings— stole out 
from between my shutters, which I immediately 
closed again, and fell struggling and flopping 
on the pavement, in the middle of the street. 
The ring to which it was attached slid on the 
string which in the dusk was invisible, and I 
kept it hopping and jumping on the -ground 
flapping very comically. Then when a passer- 
by stooped to see what this queer creature was 
that jumped so incessantly, crack! I twitched 
the string very hard, and the bird flew up into 
the air hitting him on the nose. | 

Oh! Did not I have fun those fine summer 
twilights lurking behind my shutters; did not I 
laugh all alone, at the shrieks and alarms and con- 


jectures to which they gave rise. What amazes 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE 231 





me is that after the first fright every one laughed 
as heartily as I did; most of them, to be sure, 
were neighbours, who might guess at the author 
of this practical joke, and I was a favourite in the 
quarter in those days. Or else they were sailors, 
good-natured souls, generally very indulgent to 
childish tricks—and with good reason. 

But the thing which will always remain inex- 
plicable is that my family, who as a rule sinned 
on the side of preciseness, could shut their eyes 
to this sport, and indeed tacitly allow it through 
one whole spring. I have never been able to 
account for this want of propriety; and years, 
instead of clearing up this mystery, have only 
made it seem more astounding. 

The black bird is, I need hardly say, preserved 
as one of my many relics; now and then every 
two or three years I get it out to look at—a little 
mite-eaten, but reminding me still of the lovely 
evenings of departed Junes and the delicious in- 


toxication of my childhood’s springs. 


232 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





LXIV. 


N those Thursdays at /a Limozse, in the torrid 
sunshine, when all nature slept exhausted in 

the silent country, I had made it a habit to climb 
up the wall at the bottom of the garden and sit 
perched there, astride, without stirring from the 
spot, buried up to my ears in ivy, with the erass- 
hoppers and flies buzzing all round me. I looked 
out over the deserted, baking landscape as from 
an observatory—the heath, the woods, and the 
filmy haze of mirage which the heat kept in a 
constant tremulous ripple like the surface of a 
lake. The distant views still had for me that mys- 
tery of the unknown which I had lent them in 
the earlier summers of my life. I pictured to 
myself that the rather desolate tract I could see 
from this dale stretched away indefinitely in heath 
and forest, like a really primitive country; and 


though I knew now that not ‘far away there 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 233 








were roads and farms, and towns, as there were 
everywhere else, it did not matter; I could still 
delude myself as to the wildness of these dis- 
tances. 

Indeed, to cheat myself, I took care to hold up 
my hand like a spy-glass, so as to shut out every- 
thing which could spoil the desert view; an old 
farmhouse, for instance, a patch of vineyard, and 
a glimpse of the wood. So up there, all alone, 
with nothing to disturb the silence but the hum 
of insects, by always looking through my hand 
only in the direction where there was least culti- 
vation, i managed to give myself a very sufficient 
sense of a wild and foreign land. 

More especially of Brazil. Why Brazil I know 
not; but it was Brazil which the neighbouring 
wood represented to my fancy in these hours of 
contemplation. 

I must pause for a moment to describe this 
wood, the first wood on earth that I ever loved; 
very old evergreen oaks, never stripped of their 
deep green leaves, formed a sort of colonnade 


like a temple of noble trunks; and beneath their 


234 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








shade not a shrub, but a quite peculiar character 
of soil, always dry, covered all the year round 
with exquisitely fine grass, as close and minute as 
a growth of down, with here and there a few ferns 


and a very few shade-loving flowers. 


LXV. 


HE Iliad was the lesson we were studying in 
class, and I might have loved it no doubt, but: 
that it had been made odious to me with parsing, 
and ‘impositions’ and parrot-like repetition; and 
suddenly I paused, moved to admiration by the 


famous line: 


By Saxéwv mapa Biva moAvdAoicBo.o Oaddoons 


which ends like the splash of a wave at high tide 
as it spreads its foam on a pebbly beach. 
“ Observe,” says the Grand-Ape, “observe the 
imitative harmony.” 
Oh yes, never fear; I had observed it. No 


need to bid me observe anything of that kind. 








A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 235 





One of the things I most admired, with less 
justice perhaps, was this passage of Virgil: 


fine adeo media est nobis via » namque sepulcrum 
L[hcipit apparere Bianoris :... 


From the very beginning of the eclogue I 
had watched the two shepherds making their way 
across the antique landscape. I could see it 
plainly: the Roman campagna two thousand 
years ago; hot, rather bare, with clumps of 
butcher’s broom and evergreen oak, like the 
stony district of /a Lzmozse, in which I found the 
same old world pastoral charm. 

On they went, those two shepherds, and pres- 
ently perceived that they were half-way, because 
the sepulchre of Bianoris was in sight. I could 
see that too, that tomb. Its old stones stood out, 
a white spot on the reddish road covered with 
low-growing herbs, rather burnt up, wild thyme 
or marjoram, and here and there a hungry, dark- 
leaved shrub. The sonorous name Szanorts, 
ending the phrase, suddenly gave me with magi- 


cal vividness the impression of the music made 


236 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


by the insects as they buzzed round the travellers 
in the stillness of a very hot noon, lighted up by 
a younger sun under the serene quiet of an 
ancient month of June. I was no longer in 
school; I was out on the campagna in the com- 
pany of those two shepherds, walking on the 
scorched wild flowers and sunburnt grass, under a 
very brilliant summer sky—but yet all thin and 
faint, seen vaguely, as it were through a telescope, 
in the remote past. 

Who knows! If the Grand-Ape could have 
guessed whither my mind had wandered, it might 


perhaps have drawn us together a little. 


LXVI. 


N acertain Thursday evening, at fa Limozse, 
while awaiting the inevitable moment of de- 
parture, I had gone upstairs alone to the great 
old bedroom on the first floor, which was mine. 
At first I stood with my elbows on the window- 
sill to watch the July sun sink crimson behind the 








A CHILD’S ROMANCE. ane 





stony plain and the ferny moor towards the sea 
beyond, which though not distant was invisible. 
So melancholy, always, were these sunsets at the 
end of my Thursday holiday. 

And then, at the last moment, just before 
starting, I took it into my head, as I had never 
done before, to rummage in the old Louis XV. 
book-case by the side of my bed. There, among 
the books in their last century bindings, where 
maggots, undisturbed, were diligently eating out 
their galleries, I found a note-book covered with 
rare old-fashioned paper, and I opened it without 
thought. And there I learnt with a thrill of 
excitement that “from noon till four o’clock on 
the 20th of June, 1813, in long. 110 E. and lat. 
15 S. (thus between the tropics and in the wide 
Pacific) the weather was fine, sea smooth, a light 
breeze from the southwest, the sky covered with 
the light clouds known as mares’-tails, and many 
flying-fish alongside.” 

Dead, long ago, were the eyes which had ob- 
served the fugitive cloud-shapes, and watched the 


flying-fish. The note-book, as I at once per- 


238 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





ceived, was one of those records known as log- 
books, kept day by day on board ship; it did 
not astonish me as a novelty, though I had 
never before had one in my hands. Still, it was 
astrange and unexpected thing to find myself 
thus suddenly initiated into the familiar aspects of 
sky and ocean on the high Pacific seas, on a par- 
ticular day now so long ago. Oh! To see them. 
with my own eyes! The smooth, calm sea, the 
mares’-tails streaking the deep immensity of the 
blue sky, and the swift flying-fish cleaving the 
tropical solitude. 

What delightful things there must be in that 
sailor-life which terrified me and was prohibited 
to me! I had never felt it so keenly as this eve- 
ning. The ineffaceable memory of this stolen 
reading was the cause of my never failing to look 
over the ship’s side if a shoal of flying-fish was 
reported by the steersman when I happened to 
be on watch; and I have always felt distinct pleas- 
ure in recording the incident in the log-book so 


like that kept by the seamen of 1813 before me. 











A.CHILD’S ROMANCE. 239 





LXVITI. 


N the following holidays our departure for the 
South and the mountains was a greater joy 
than it had been the first time. As in the pre- 
vious year, my sister andI set out at the begin- 
ning of August; no longer on a voyage of dis- 
covery, it is true; but the delight of going back 
again and finding everything there which had 
charmed me so much, was even greater than that 
of the journey into the unknown. 

Between the place where the railway ended 
and the little town where the cousins lived, a long 
drive in a hired carriage, our little coachman took 
us by cross-country cuts, lost his way, and carried 
us we knew not where, but into the most delicious 
nooks of country. The weather was splendid, 
wonderful. How gleefully I hailed the first peas- 
ant-women carrying large copper water-jars on 


their heads, the first tanned labourers talking 


° 


240 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





pators, the first fields of red earth and the first 
mountain junipers. 

In the middle of day, during a halt to rest 
the horses in the hollow of a shady dell, by a re- 
mote village called Veyrac, we sat down under a 
chestnut tree, and we were there besieged by the 
ducks of the place, the most audacious and ill- 
bred ducks in the world, which gathered round 
us in force with the most outrageous quacking. 
When we were setting off again in the carriage, 
with the absurd creatures still in pursuit, my sis- 
ter turned to them, and said with the dignity of 
the traveller of antiquity who was insulted by an 
inhospitable populace: ‘‘ Ducks of Veyrac, be 
ye accursed !’—After all these years I cannot 
think calmly of the fit of laughing this gave rise 
to. And above all I can never remember the day 
without a regret for that glory of sunshine and 

lue sky, such I have no eyes to see now. 

On our arrival we found a party waiting for 
us by the roadside, at the bridge over the river— 
our cousins and the little Peyrals, waving their 


handkerchiefs. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 241 





I was happy at meeting my little band all 
complete. We had all grown a little and were 
taller by an inch or so; but we saw at once that 
this had made no difference, that we were as much 
as ever children, and inclined for the same games. 

At dusk there was a tremendous storm; and 
while it was thundering as if a whole battery of 
artillery were being discharged on my uncle’s 
roof, while from all the old gargoyles in the vil- 
lage torrents of water were rushing down the 
black pebbles of the street pavement, the little 
Peyrals and I took refuge in the kitchen, to make 
a noise and dance at our ease. 

A very large kitchen; furnished in the old 
fashion, with an arsenal of copper pots and pans, 
kettles and frying-pans, hung against the wall in 
order of size and glittering like plate armour. It 
was almost dark; the good smell of the storm 
was rising up—of wet earth and summer rain, 
and through the deep iron-barred Louis XIII. 
windows the broad green flashes came in every 
minute, blinding us and compelling us to shut our 


eyes in spite of ourselves. 
16 


242 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





We spun and spun like crazy things singing a 
sentimental tune which, as it had certainly never 
been composed to be danced to, we scanned with 
absurd false emphasis to make it suit our round- 
about whirl. How long this gleeful saraband may 
have lasted I do not know; the storm had ex- 
cited us to frenzy, and the wild noise we made 
and our vehement tee-totum went to our brain, 
like little dervishes; it was all in honour of my — 
return and a way of worthily beginning the holi- 
days; of laughing at the Grand-Ape, and inau- 
gurating the endless excursions and childish games 
of every kind which began again more than ever 


on the morrow. 


LXVIII. 


EXT morning I awoke at daybreak, hearing 
a regular clatter which I had lost the habit 
of being used to; the weaver close by, beginning 


already at dawn the to and fro of the hereditary 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 243 





shuttle. Then, upon a single moment of inde- 
cision, I remembered with exuberant joy that I 
had just come to the South; that it was the morn- 
ing of the first day; that a whole summer of open 
air and free device lay before me: August and 
September, two months such as now fly like a 
single day, but then seemed very respectably 
long. It was with real rapture that I awoke to 
consciousness after a good night’s sleep. “I had 
joy in waking.” 

I had remembered from some book I had read 
during the past winter, some story of the North 
American Lake Indians, an incident which had 
struck my fancy: An old Red-skin, whose 
daughter was pining for love of a Pale-face, had 
at last consented to give her to the stranger, “ to 
the end that she might once more have joy in 
waking.” 

Joy in waking! Yes, for some time I had 
learned to note that the moment of waking is 
always that in which we have the most vivid im- 
pression of what ever is bright or sad in life, and 


- find it most acutely painful to lack joy; my first 


244 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

little sorrows, my first little remorse, my ter- 
rors for the future, were always most urgent at 
that moment of the day —to vanish forthwith, it 
is true at that age. 

My waking moments were to be gloomier as 
time went on, and they are now instants of ter- 
rific lucidity when I see the under side — the 
seamy side of life, stripped of the mirages which 
during the day still divert my mind and still veil — 
it; when I most clearly see the swift flight of 
years, the crumbling of everything to which I try 
to cling, and the final void, the gaping gulf of 
death, close at hand and bare of all disguise. 

But that morning I had joy in waking. And 
I got up early, not being able to rest content in 
my bed, eager to be out and about, and wonder- 
ing where I should begin my round of visits and 
inspection. 

There were all the old corners of the town to 
be seen, and the gothic ramparts, and the de- 
licious river. — And my uncle’s garden, where, 
since last year, the most impossible butterflies 


might perhaps have chosen to settle. And visits. 





A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 245° 





to pay in strange old houses, to all the good 
women of the neighbourhood, who last year had 
loaded me with all the best grapes off their vines 
as though it were tribute due tome; one Madame 
Jeanne, more especially, a rich old peasant woman 
who had quite an adoration for me and fulfilled 
all my behests, and who, whenever she passed 
homewards, like Nausicaa from the washing 
place, shot side-long glances at my uncle’s house, 
for my particular benefit, which were comical be- 
yond words. — And then the vineyards and woods 
outside and the mountain paths, and Castelnau 
out there, lifting its battlemented towers above 
the pedestal of chesnuts and oaks, and inviting 
me to its ruins. Where should I go first, and 
how be ever weary of such a land! 

The sea, whither indeed I was rarely taken 
now, I had for the time completely forgotten. 

After two months of happiness the dreadful 
return to lessons, which I could not help thinking 
of, was to be relieved by my brother’s first home- 
coming. His four years of absence were not 
quite yet ended, but we knew that he had left the 


246 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








mysterious island and was to be expected in Oc- 
tober. To me it would be a new acquaintance to 
make; I wondered uneasily whether he would 
love me when he saw me, whether he would like 
me, whether a thousand details — for instance, my 
way of playing Beethoven — would be to his taste. 

I thought incessantly of his arrival, now so 
near; I was so delighted at the prospect and 
looked forward to such a complete change in my 
life that I quite forgot my usual autumn terrors. 

But I intended to ask his advice too about a 
thousand things that troubled me, and confide to 
him all my anxieties as to the future. I knew, 
indeed, that his opinion was to be taken as to 
some definite plan for me, to direct my studies 
and decide on my career; that was the black spot 
on his return. 

Pending this momentous fiat I would find as 
much amusement and forgetfulness as possible 
without any cares for the morrow, giving myself 
every enjoyment, and more than ever, during 
these holidays, which I regarded as the last of 
my child-life. 








A. CHILD’S ROMANCE. 247 





LXIX. 


FTER our mid-day dinner it was the custom 
of the house to sit for an hour or two in 
the stone-floored entrance hall, with its great red 
copper cistern; it was the coolest spot during the 
oppressive heat of the day. It was kept dark 
by closing every door and shutter; only two or 
three shafts of sunshine in which the flies sported, 
streamed in through the cracks of the heavy 
Louis XIII. front door. But in the silent village, 
where no one was stirring, there was nothing to 
be heard but the eternal chatter of hens; every 
other creature seemed to be asleep. 

I did not stay in the cool hall, not I. The 
blazing sun outside tempted me; and besides, no 
sooner had we settled down than we heard tap- 
tap at the front door; the Peyrals, come to fetch 
me, and all three lifting and dropping the old iron 
knocker, so hot that it made their fingers tingle. 


Then, with our hats well over our eyes, away 


248 A CHILD’S ROMANCE, 





we went on some fresh enterprise every day, with 
hammers, sticks and butterfly nets. First along 
the narrow cobble-stoned streets; then by the first 
paths outside the village, which were always deep 
in a bed of chaff, in which we sank up to our 
ancles and which filled our shoes; then, at last, 
came the open country, the vineyards and paths 
up the hillside —or the river, which we could 
cross on stepping-stones, with its islands full of 
flowers. 

As a contrast to my coddled and too quiet 
life at home nothing could be more complete ; but 
still I lacked the company of other boys of my 
own age and wholesome friction; besides it only 


lasted two months. 


LXX. 


NE day, out of impudence, in sheer brav- 
ado —I know not really why, I took into 

my head that I should like to do something thor- 
oughly nasty. And after having thought of what 


it should be all one morning I hit upon it. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 249 





Everyone knows the swarms of flies which we 
have in the summer in the Southern provinces, 
fouling everything, a perfect scourge. In the 
middle of my uncle’s kitchen a trap was laid for 
them, a sort of treacherous drinking place of a 
particular shape where, at the bottom they were 
inevitably drowned in soapy water. Well, that 
day I discerned at the bottom of this jar a horri- 
ble black mass formed of the myriads of flies 
which had been drowned there these two or 
three days, and it struck me that I might have 
them made into a dish —a pancake or an ome- 
lette. 

Very hurriedly, with a feeling of disgust 
amounting to nausea, I turned the black mess 
into a plate and carried it off privily to old 
Madame Jeanne, my faithful adorer, the only per- 
son in the world who would do anything and 
everything for me. , 

“An omelette aux mouches! Why, to be 
sure, what would be simpler?” said she. Fire, 
frying-pan, eggs at once, and the filthy thing, 


well beaten, was set to cook in the great medieval 


250 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





hearth while I looked on horrified and disgusted 
with myself. 

Then came the three little Peyrals, and com- 
forted me by going into ecstasies over my idea— 
as they always did, and when the dish was done 
to a turn and served up all hot, we went off in 
triumph to show it to our elders, marching in 
procession and singing in our deepest bass voices, 


as if we were carrying the devil to the grave. 


LXXTI. 


HE end of the summer was especially deli- 
cious out there, when the meadows were 
purple with autumn crocus in front of the yellow- 
ing woods. Then the vintage began, lasting at 
least a fortnight and perfectly enchanting us. In 
the little glades of the woods, or the fields ad- 
joining the Peyrals’ vineyards, where we spent all 
our days; we made feasts of bonbons and fruit, 


laying the fruit out on the grass in the most ele- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 251 





gant manner, surrounded in the antique style 
with garlands, and with large yellow or red vine 
leaves to serve as plates. The vintagers would 
bring us the most exquisite grapes, chosen out of 
thousands of bunches; with the help of the sun 
we were sometimes really a little tipsy, not with 
sweet wine even, for we had none, but simply 
with grapes, as the wasps and bees get tipsy in 


the sun on a vine-trellice. 


One morning at the end of September, when 
the weather was rainy and chill and had a melan- 
choly flavour of autumn, I went into the kitchen, 
attracted by a fire of brushwood which was blaz- 
ing merrily in the high old chimney. And being 
there, idle and put out by the rain, to amuse my- 
self I melted an old pewter plate, and let it drop, 
all hot and liquid, into a pail of water. It took 
the shape of an irregular, distorted mass of a fine 
silvery white and looking something like ore. I 
gazed at it thoughtfully for a long time: an idea 
was forming in my mind, a scheme for a new 


form of amusement which might perhaps be the 


252 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





crowning delight of the remaining days of the 
holidays. That very evening in a committee held 
on the steps of the great staircase, with its forged 
iron railings, I explained to the little Peyrals that 
I had an idea, from the appearance of the soil 
and the plants, that perhaps there might be silver 
mines in this part of the country. And I gave 
myself such a lofty buccaneering air as stamps 
the leading figures in the old-fashioned novels of 
which the scene is laid in America. 

To seek for mines was quite in the spirit of 
my little band, who were used to setting out with 
spades and picks to seek for fossils or rare pebbles. 

So on the following day, half way up the 
mountain side, as we came to a delightful path, 
very lonely and mysterious, overhung with trees, 
and deep between two high moss-grown banks, I 
stopped the party with the dignity of a Red-skin 
scout. It would be here; I had detected the 
presence of deposits of treasure—and sure 
enough, by digging on the spot I pointed out, we 
found the first nuggets: the melted plate which I 
had come to bury there the day before. 


} 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 253 


These mines were our one idea till the end 
of the season. They were perfectly convinced 
and amazed; and even I, who melted down pew- 
ter plates and covers every morning to keep up 
the supply of silver ore, almost persuaded myself 
to believe in them. The lonely spot, exquisite 
and still, where the diggings were, and the serene 
pathos of the dying summer threw a rare charm 
over our dream of adventure. We kept our dis- 
coveries a deep and amusing mystery, as a sort of 
tribal secret among ourselves. And our riches, 
mixed with a little red earth of the mountain, 
were stored in an old trunk in my uncle’s loft, as 
in Ali Baba’s cave. We determined to leave 
them there all the winter, till next year’s holi- 
days, and then we would add greatly to our 


treasure. 


LXXII. 


T the beginning of October we were recalled 
home by a glad telegram from my father. 


My brother, who had returned to Europe by a 


254 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





mail packet from Panama, had disembarked at 
Southampton; we had only just time to hurry 
home if we wished to be there to welcome him. 
On the evening of the next day but one we 
arrived in the very nick of time, for he was to be 
expected a few hours later by a night train. 
There was only time to replace in his room, where 
they had formerly stood, the different little orna- 
ments he had entrusted to my care four years 
since, before we had to start to meet him at the 
station. To me it seemed all unreal. I could 
not believe in this return, especially at such sud- 
den notice, and I had not slept for two nights 
past. I was dropping with sleep as we waited at 
the station, in spite of my extreme impatience, 
and it was as in a dream that I saw him, and em- 
braced him, feeling shy at finding him so unlike 
the remembrance I had preserved of him; sun- 
burnt, with his beard much thicker, his words 
fewer, and eyes that scrutinized me with a half- 
smiling, half-anxious expression, as if to detect 
what the years were beginning to make of me 


and what I might turn out by and bye. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE 255 


As we went home I fairly fell asleep as I 
stood, overcome by a child’s heaviness when worn 
out by a long journey, quite impossible to fight 
against, and I was sent to bed. 


1.0.60 


AKING next morning with a sudden con- 
sciousness of something happy in the air 

and a sense of joy at the bottom of my soul, I at 
once saw an object of extraordinary outline, on a 
table in my room; evidently a canoe from the 
antipodes, very long and strange-looking with its 
outrigger and sails. Then my eyes fell on more 
unknown objects; necklaces of shells threaded 
on human hair, feather head-dresses, ornaments 
of gloomy and primitive savage simplicity, hung 
about in every direction as if distant Polynesia 
had come to me during the night. —So my 
brother had begun to unpack his cases, and he 


must have crept in quietly while I was still asleep 


256 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





and amused himself with arranging these presents 
intended for my museum. 

I jumped up and dressed quickly to go and | 
find him, for I had hardly seen him the night be- 
fore. 


LXXIV. 


ND indeed I hardly saw him during the few 
hurried weeks he spent at home with us. 
Of that time, so short as it was, I have none but 
confused memories such as remain of the objects 
seen as we fly past them on horseback. I vaguely 
recollect that his presence brought a gayer and 
younger bustle of existence into the house. [I re- 
member, too, that at times he seemed to be ab- 
sorbed in thought over matters altogether outside 
our family circle; regrets perhaps for the hot 
countries, and the ‘delicious island,” or anxieties 
as to his too near departure. 
Sometimes I could keep him a captive to the 


piano with Chopin’s hallucinating music, which 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 257 





was to me then a new discovery. He was a little 
uneasy about its effect; it was too much for me, 
he said, too enervating. Having just come into 
our midst he was better able to form an opinion, 
and he perceived no doubt that I was really 
being over-forced on the artistic side, it must be 
understood; that Chopin and Peau d’Ane were 
equally bad for me; that I was acquiring an over- 
wrought refinement in spite of my incoherent fits 
of childishness, and that almost all my amuse- 
ments were of the order of dreams. So one day, 
to my great delight, he decreed that I must learn 
to ride; but this was the only great change in 
my education which his visit made. As to the 
serious questions concerning the future which I 
so much wanted to discuss with him, I con- 
stantly put them off, fearing to approach such 
subjects and preferring to gain time, to postpone 
the decision and so, as it were, to prolong my 
childhood. And after all there was no hurry; he 
was to be with us for years. 

And one fine morning — when we _ were 
so sure of keeping him —from the admirality, 


17 


258 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





there came for him, with a new grade, the order 
to set out without delay for the furthest East 
where an expedition was being fitted out. 

So after a few days more which were spent 
in preparations for this unlooked-for naval cam- 
paign, he was gone, as though swept away by a 
gust of wind. 

Our leave-takings were, however, less sad on 
this occasion because, as we believed, his absence 
would not extend over two years. And in fact 
he was gone forever; his body was to be thrown 
overboard somewhere in the heart of the Indian 
ocean, about the middle of the Gulf of Bengal. 

When he was gone, while we could still hear 
the sound of the carriage wheels, my mother 
turned to me with a look in her eyes which at 
once moved the inmost fibres of my heart, and 
then, drawing me to her she said in a tone of 
perfect confidence: “Thank God, we shall keep 
you, at any rate!” 

Keep me!—me! Oh!—I hung my head, 
averting my eyes which must have changed their 


expression and become a little wild perhaps. I 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 259 








could not find a word or a caress in response to 
my mother. This serene confidence was a pang, 
to me, for the mere fact of hearing her say “ We 
shall keep you,’’ made me understand for the 
first time in my life how far the hardly conscious 
purpose of going away, too, had already pro- 
geressed in my mind; of going even farther than 
my brother; of going everywhere, all over the 
world. 

The notion of the navy still frightened me, 
nevertheless; I did not love it, oh no! Only to 
think of it made my heart ache, home-loving little 
creature that I was, too closely bound by a thou- 
sand soft ties. Besides, how could I ever confess 
the thought to my parents, how could I pain 
them so much, or rebel so greatly ?— Still, to 
give it all up, to stay all my life in one spot, to 
part from earth without ever having seen it — 
what a disenchanting prospect! What was the 
use of living, of growing up, then ? 

And there, in the empty drawing-room where 
the displaced furniture and a chair overturned 


were full of the sad hurry of parting, as I stood 


260 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





close to my mother, my eyes fixed on vacancy 
and my soul in a tumult, I suddenly remembered 
the log-book of those bygone mariners, which I 
had read by the light of the setting sun that 
spring at /a Limoise; the short sentences written 
in tawny ink on old paper slowly came back to 
me, one after another, with a treacherous and 
soothing charm, like what I can fancy a magic 
incantation. 

‘““Weather fine; sea smooth; a light breeze 
from the southeast; shoals of flying-fish to star- 
board.” 

It was with a thrill of almost religious awe, a sort 
of pantheistic rapture that the vision rose around 
me of the South Pacific ocean, solemn and infinite 


and dazzling blue. 
LXXV. 


MELANCHOLY calm succeeded my 
brother’s departure, and the days followed 
each other in absolute monotony. 


I was probably to be sent to the Zcole Poly- 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 261 





technique, though this was not finally determined 
on. The idea of being a sailor, which had grown 
up in me in spite of myself, bewitched and terri- 
fied me in an almost equal degree. For lack of 
courage to open up so serious a question I always 
shrank from mentioning it; I even concluded that 
I would still think the matter over till the next 
holidays, allowing myself these few months as a 
last reprieve to my childish irresolution and care- 
lessness. 

I lived just as much alone as ever; my taste 
for solitude was by this time confirmed and difh- 
cult to break through, in spite of my anxieties and 
my latent passion for freedom and running about 
the world. I spent most of my time at home, busy 
painting strange scenery, or playing Chopin and 
Beethoven, content, to all seeming, and absorbed 
in dreams; and every day I grew fonder of my 
home, of its every nook and corner, and the very 
stones of its walls. I rode on horseback now, it 
is true, but always with a servant, never with any 
one of my own age. I still had no playfellows. 


However, my second year of  school-life 


262 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

seemed less dreadful than the first; it passed less 
slowly, and I had at last made friends with two 
bigger boys, my seniors by a year or two; the 
only lads who, the year before, had not treated 
me as an impracticable little being. The ice once 
broken we three at once became fast friends of 
the most sentimental type; we even called each 
other by our Christian names, quite against the 
common law of manners in schools. And as we 
never by any chance met except in class, and 
were obliged to converse in mysterious asides 
under terror of the master’s rod, that alone was 
enough to give to our intercourse a tone of good 
breeding which had no resemblance with the usual 
behaviour of boys to each other. I was really 
very much attached to them. I would have done 
anything they desired, and honestly believed that 
this feeling would last all my life. 

Otherwise I was most exclusive; the rest of 
the school to me simply did not exist. At the 
same time I was beginning as it were to secrete a 
superficial self for social purposes, a thin outer 


covering which kept on good terms with every 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 263 


one, while my real inner self eluded them com- 
pletely. 

I generally contrived to sit between my two 
friends André and Paul; and if we were divided 
we exchanged constant notes in a private cypher 
to which we alone had the key. 

Confidential on love affairs, were those notes: 
“IT saw her to-day ; she had a blue gown trimmed 
with grey fur, and a hat with a wing init, etc., 


” 


etc.”” For we each had chosen a young lady 
who was the usual theme of our romantic com- 
munications. 

A certain infusion of such nonsense and ab- 
surdity is inevitable at this age of transition in a 
boy’s life, and I must therefore make a note of it 
in passing. 

In passing, too, I may say that this period 
lasted with me longer than with most men, be- 
cause it carried me from one extreme to the 
other — not without striking on every reef by the 
way,—and I am conscious of having preserved, 
till I was at least five and twenty, certain strange 


and whimsical peculiarities. 


264 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


I will now give the story of our three love 
affairs. 

André was devoted to a young lady of six- 
teen at least, and already out in the world — and 
in his case I believe it was a genuine emotion. 

The lady of my adoration was Jeanne, and no 
one but my two friends knew the secret. To do 
as they did, though it struck me as rather silly, I 
wrote her name in cypher on the covers of my 
copy books; and in a dilettante fashion, for the 
notion of the thing, I tried to persuade myself 
that I was really in love; but I must own that it 
was somewhat factitious, for, in point of fact the 
little coquetry of our first acquaintance had 
become, between Jeanne and me, a very true and 
hearty friendship —a hereditary friendship, so to 
speak, the reflection of that which had subsisted 
between our grandparents. My real first love, 
which I will presently relate and which also dates 
from that time, was for the vision of a dream. 

As to Paul — it was a great shock at first, es- 
pecially with the notions I then held —his pas- 


sion was for a little shop-girl at a perfumer’s; he 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 265 





—— = 





saw her on his Sundays out behind the shop 
window. To be sure her name was Stella, or 
Olympia, or something of the kind, which raised 
her considerably, and he took care to wrap up 
this love affair in a sort of ethereal and poetic 
sentimentality to make it acceptable. He was 
constantly passing up mysterious scraps of paper 
scribbled with honeyed rhymes in her honour, in 
which her name, ending in A, recurred again and 
again like the scent of pomatum. 

In spite of my affection for him these verses 
made me smile with irritated pity. They were in 
a great degree the reason why I never, never, at 
any period of my life, thought of writing a line of 
poetry, a fact which is I believe singular, if not 
unique. My notes were always penned in prose, 
unfettered by rules, in a boldly independent 
style. 


LXXVI. 


si Noha very Paul, too, knew the poems of a for- 
bidden author, one Alfred de Musset, which 


troubled my soul as something unheard-of, re- 


266 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





volting but delightful. He would whisper them 
to me in school in a scarcely audible murmur, 
and with a twinge of remorse I would make him 


begin again: 


Jacque était immobile et regardait Marie, 
Je ne sais ce qu’avait cette femme endormie 
ID’étrange dans ses traits, de grand, de déja vu.* 


In my brother’s study, where I was wont to 
shut myself up from time to time, reviving my 
regrets at his departing, I had seen on a bookshelf 
a large volume of the poet’s works, and I had 
often been tempted to take it down; but I had 
been told that I was never to touch one of these 
books without telling my parents beforehand, 
and my conscience always stopped me. 

As to asking leave, I knew only too well that 


it would not be given. 


*Jacque stood motionless looking at Marie; 
I know not what there was in the sleeping woman 
That was strange in her face, and fine, and seen before. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 267 








LXXVII. 


HIS is a dream I had in the fourteenth May of 

my life. It came to me in one of those 

mild, soft nights which follow the long delicious 
twilight. 

Up in my little room I had gone to sleep to 
the distant sound of the dance-rounds sung by 
the sailors and girls round the May-poles in the 
streets. Until I was sound asleep I had listened 
to those very old French refrains which the com- 
mon people sing on that coast in full hearty 
voices, and which came up to me softened, mel- 
lowed, poetised through the tranquil stillness. I 
had been lulled rather weirdly by the noise of this 
glad life and overflowing glee, such as come, dur- 
ing their brief youth, to beings so much simpler 
than we are and less aware of death. 

In my dream it was dusk, not gloomy, but as 


sweet as the May night outside, warm and full of 


268 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





the good smell of spring. I was in our back- 
garden which was not altered nor strange, and 
I walked on under the walls covered with flower- 
ing jasmine, honeysuckle and roses; but doubt- 
ful and agitated, seeking I knew not what, con- 
scious of some one who was waiting for me and 
whom I longed to see, or of something unfamiliar 
which was going to happen and which had gone 
to my head by anticipation. 

At a spot where a very old rose-tree grew, 
planted by some ancestor and reverently pre- 
served, though it scarcely produced a single 
rose every two or three years, I perceived a 
young girl standing motionless with a mysterious 
smile. 

The darkness grew oppressive and enervating. 
All round me the gloom deepened, too; but on 
her there was a faint gleam as if from a reflector, 
which defined her figure clearly against a thin 
line of shadow. 

I felt that she must be very pretty and young; 
but her eyes and brow were shrouded in dark- 


ness; I could see nothing plainly but her mouth, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 269 





which was parted in a smile, and the oval of her 
chin was lovely. She stood quite close to the 
old flowerless rose tree, almost among the 
branches. And the night grew darker and 
darker. She seemed quite at home there, 
dropped from I knew not whence, without any 
door having opened to admit her; she seemed to 
think it quite natural that she should be there, 
and I quite natural that I should find her there. 

I went very close up to her to look at her 
eyes which evaded me, and then I suddenly saw 
them quite plainly in spite of the deepening 
night, which was heavier every moment. They 
smiled as her lips did; and they were not just 
any eyes, as though she had been an abstract 
image of youth; on the contrary, they were very 
particularly somebody's eyes; as I looked at them 
they came back to me as eyes I had loved 
and now found again, with a gush of infinite ten- 
MeENeSS 17°.4/4y': 

Waking with a start, I tried to detain the vi- 
sion, which faded, faded—more and more intangi- 


ble and unreal as my spirit grew clearer with the 


270 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 


effort to remember. Was it possible, after all, 
that she was not and had never been anything but 
an airy lifeless nothing, now reabsorbed into the 
void of imaginary, non-existent things. I tried 
to go to sleep and see her once more; the idea 
that it was all gone, nothing but a dream, was a 
disappointment almost to desperation. 

It was very long before I forgot her; I loved 
her — loved her deeply ; whenever I thought of 
her it was with great agitation, at once sweet and 
painful; everything that was not she, seemed 
to me for the time colourless and mean. I was 
really in love; it was truly love, with its great 
melancholy and its great mystery, with its sad but 
supreme enchantment, left clinging like a perfume 
to everything it has touched; that corner of the 
garden where she appeared to me, and the old 
rose-tree which had held her in its sprays, had 
ever after an inexplicable anguish and ecstasy 


that they had borrowed from her. 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 271 


pis oh ie oe 


LXXVIII. 


T was glorious June, evening, the exquisite 
hour of twilight. I was alone in my brother's 
room; I had been there some minutes ; through 
the window, wide open to the rosy sky shaded 
into gold, came the sharp cries of the house-swal- 
lows as they circled in clouds above the old roofs. 
No one knew that I was there; never had I 
felt more utterly alone at the top of the house 
nor more tempted by the unknown. My heart 
beat high as I opened that volume of Musset: 
Don Paez. 
The first melodious, musical phrases were as 
it were sung to me in an entrancing golden 


voice: 


Sourcils noirs, blanches mains, et, pour la petitesse 
De ses pieds, elle était Andalouse et comtesse. * 





Eyebrows black, hands white, and for the smallness 
Of her feet, she was Andalusian and a countess. 


272 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





When the spring night had quite closed in, 
when my eyes, held very close to the page, could 
distinguish nothing of the magical verse but little 
grey lines on the white page, I went out alone 
into the town. 

In the almost empty streets, as yet unlighted, 
the rows of limes and acacias in bloom scented 
the air and made the darkness deeper. Having 
pulled my felt hat over my eyes, like Don Paez, 
I walked on with a brisk, light step, looking up 
at the balconies and dreaming I know not what 
childish dreams of nights in Spain and Andalu- 
sian serenades. 


LXXIX. 


GAIN the holidays came round; our jour- 
ney to the South was made once more, for 

the third time; and there, under the glorious 
sunshine of August and September, everything 
went on as it had done in former years: the 


same games with my faithful little friends, the 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. Fy 





same excursions in the vineyards and mountains, 
the same reveries of medieval times among the 
ruins of Castelnau, and the same zealous search 
along the lonely path where our veins of silver 
lay, with the same buccaneering airs — although 
the little Peyrals had really ceased to believe in 
the mines. 

This regular recurrence of the same events 
each summer sometimes made me almost be- 
lieve that my child-life might be indefinitely pro- 
longed; but, meanwhile, I had ceased to have 
“joy on waking.” A sort of uneasiness, like 
that which lurks in the consciousness of a task 
not done, came over me every morning with in- 
creasing pangs at the thought that time was fly- 
ing, that the holidays were coming to an end, 
and that I had not yet found courage to seal my 
fate. 


LXXX. 


ND one day, when mid-September was 
already past, I perceived, from the press- 


ing anxiety which weighed on me at waking, that 
18 


274 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








I -cotild) evade itv-no longer.) The) termi Tchad 
fixed for myself had come. 

As to the decision, it was already more than 
half formed in the depths of my mind; to make 
it effective, I had now only to announce it, and 
I vowed that the day should not pass without its 
being done and done bravely. It was to my 
brother that I first would declare it, fancying 
that he, too, would do his utmost to oppose 
my scheme, but in the end he would take my 
part and help me to gain my point. 

So after our mid-day dinner, when the sun 
was at the fiercest, I carried my paper and pen 
into my uncle’s garden and there locked myself 
in to write my letter. It was one of my habits 
as a child to do my lessons or write letters in the 
open air, often in the oddest places—among the 
boughs of a tree or on a roof. 

It was a scorching and cloudless autumn 
day, quiet to sadness in that old garden which 
seemed more silent — more foreign, perhaps, 
than ever, impressing me with more than com- 


mon regret at being away from my mother, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE, 275 





and seeing the summer end so far from home 
and from the flowers in my own dear little gar- 
den. But, after all, what I had come here to 
write would result in my being more than ever 
parted from all I loved so well, and it put me ina 
mournful mood. I felt as though there were act- 
ually something solemn in the atmosphere of 
that garden; as though the very walls, the plum- 
trees, the trellised vines, the fields of luzerne 
beyond, had an interest in this first serious step 
in my’ life which was about to be taken in their 
sight. 

I hesitated which of three places I should sit 
in to write, all three boiling hot, with very lit- 
tle shade. It was a mere excuse for gaining 
time and delaying this letter, which, according 
to the views I then held, would make my de- 
cision irrevocable when once I had thus pro- 
claimed it. The earth was already strewn with 
russet vine-trails and dead leaves; hollyhocks 
and dahlias, grown as tall as trees, had a few 
sparse blossoms at the top of their straggling 


stems; the torrid sun was finishing the ripening 


276 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





of those large-seeded, yellow grapes with a 
musky flavour, which are always later than the 
others, and, in spite of the intense heat and the 
translucent blue sky, there was a sense of ended 
summer in the air. 

I finally settled myself in the arbour at the 
bottom of the garden; the vines had lost most 
of their leaves; but the last metallic-blue butter- 
flies were still to be seen, and the wasps haunt- 
ing the muscat grapes. 

And there, in calm, still loneliness, in the 
summer silence full of insect-music, I wrote and 
timidly signed my compact with the sea. 

Of the letter itself I remember not a word; 
but I well remember the emotion of sealing it, as 
if, with that envelope, I had sealed my fate for ever. 

After another short pause for thought, I 
wrote the address; my brother’s name and that 
of a land in the furthest East, where he then 
was.—Now there was nothing more to be done 
but to carry it the post-office; but I remained sit- 
ting there a long time, very thoughtful, with my 
back against the heated wall where the lizards 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 277 
were scampering, and nursing on my knees, with 
a sense of woe, the little square of paper on which 
I had signed away my future life. Then, having 
a fancy to look out at the horizon and get a sight 
of space, I put my foot in the well-known hole 
by which I climbed to watch the escape of the 
butterflies I had failed to catch, and hoisted myself 
to the top of the wall where I rested on my elbows. 
I saw the same familiar distance, the hills draped 
in reddening vines, the mountains where the trees 
were turning yellow and shedding their leaves, 
and far away the great stone ruin of Castelnau. 
In front of all this lay Bories, with its old arched 
gateway, and, as I saw it, the plaintive air: “dx / 
ah! la bonne histoire!’ came back to me ina 
strange voice, and the sulphur butterfly, which had 
been lying there two years with a pin through it, 
under glass in my little museum. 

It was near the hour when the old country 
mail coach would be starting, carrying away the 
letters. I got down from my wall, I quitted the 
old garden, locking it behind me, and slowly 


made my way to the post-office. 


278 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





$$$ 


I walked on like a being in a dream, paying 
no heed to anything or anybody. My mind was 
wandering far: in the fern-forests of the Delightful 
Isle, over the sands of gloomy Senegal, where 
that uncle had been who owned the museum, and 
across the great Southern Ocean, where there were 
shoals of flying-fish. 

The positive and proximate certainty of see- 
ing all this intoxicated me; for the first time in 
all my life the world seemed to lie open before 
me; a new light shone on my path—a rather sor- 
rowful light, it is true, and rather lonely, but 
powerful, and piercing to the uttermost horizon 
of old age and death. 

Certain very childish fancies intruded them- 
selves now and then on this vast daydream. I 
saw myself in a sailor’s uniform, walking in the 
sunshine on the burning shore of some tropical 
town, or coming home after perilous voyages; 
bringing with me _ sea-chests full of wonderful 
things, out of which the cockroaches would creep 
as in the yard at Jeanne’s house when her father’s 


cases were unpacked, 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 279 








And suddenly my heart was very full. 
These home-comings after long travel could not 
yet take place for many years—and then the 
faces that would welcome me would be changed 
by time.—I pictured them at once, those well- 
beloved faces; I saw them all together in a dim 
vision—a group which hailed me with smiles of 
loving welcome, but which was so sad to contem- 
plate! Wrinkles on every brow; and my mother 
with white curls as she has at this day.—And my 
grandaunt Bertha, so old already, would she still 
be there ? 

I was hastily and fearfully calculating my 
grandaunt’s age, when I reached the post-office. 
But I did not hesitate; my hand only trembled a 
little as I dropped my letter into the box, and the 


die was cast. 


LXXXI. 


HERE end these reminiscences; in the first 
place because succeeding events are not yet 


far enough away from me to be laid before un- 


280 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 





known readers; and also because I think that my 
childhood really ended on the day when I thus 
decided my lot. 

I was then fourteen and a half; I had three 
years before me to prepare to enter the naval 
school, so it was altogether a reasonable and 
possible plan. 

I had, however, to come into collision with 
refusals and difficulties of every kind before I 
found myself entered on the Borda. After that 
I had to live through many years of hesitancy, 
struggles and mistakes, many a hill of penance to 
climb. I had to pay cruelly for my early life as 
a sensitive little recluse; to reforge and harden 
both my physical and moral temper by sheer 
force of will; — till, one day, when I was about 
seven-and-twenty, a circus manager, having seen 
how my muscles now acted like steel springs, ex- 
pressed his admiration in these words, the truest 
I ever heard spoken: ‘“ What a pity, Monsieur, 


that your training began so late !” 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 281 





LXXXII. 


Y sister and I expected to go back next 

summer again to that village in the south. 

But Azraél crossed our path; terrible and unfore- 

seen events devastated our peaceful, happy home- 
life. 

It was not till fifteen years later, after having 
scoured the seas, that I once more beheld that 
nook of France. 

Everything was changed; the uncle and aunt 
slept in the graveyard; the sons were scattered; 
the daughter, who already had threads of 
silver in her hair, was about to leave the place 
and the empty house where she could not bear 
to live alone, never to return. Titi and Maricette 
—who had lost these baby-names—were tall girls 
in mourning whom I should not have recog- 


nized. 


282 A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 








Between two voyages, ina hurry as usual, my 
life rushing on its feverish course, I] came back 
for only a few hours on a pilgrimage of mem- 


ing 


ories, wishing to see the house where “ my uncle 
in the South” had lived, before it was given over 
to strange hands. 

It was November; a cold grey sky had en- 
tirely altered the aspect of the country, which I 
had never before seen but under the splendid 
summer sun. 

After spending the only morning I had to 
spare in seeing everything once more, with ever- 
growing melancholy, under the winter clouds, I 
found I had forgotten the old garden and the 
vine-grown arbour, where my life’s fortune had 
been decided, and I would wish to visit it at the 
last moment, before the carriage started which 
was to bear me away for ever. 

“Go alone,” said my cousin; she, too, busied 
in closing her trunks; and she gave me the big 
key—the very same big key which I had been 
wont to carry when I went there butterfly-hunt- 


ing, net in hand, in the glowing and- glorious 


A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 283 





days gone by. Those summers of my child- 
hood, how wonderful and full of enchantment 
they had been. 

So for the very last time I went into the gar- 
den, which struck me at first as having grown 
smaller under the dull sky. I went straight to 
the arbour, now bare of leaves and desolate, 
where I had written the all-important letter to 
my brother, and by the help of the same hole 
in the wall I hoisted myself to the top, to steal 
a glance at the surrounding country and hastily 
bid it a last farewell; then I saw Bories, looking 
strangely near and very small, too; unrecogniz- 
able—as indeed the mountains were in the dis- 
tance, as if they had settled down into little 
hills. And the whole scene, which I had seen 
of old in the sunshine, was dreary now in the 
dull grey light. I felt as though the last autumn 
of my life were upon me, as it was on the 
earth. 

And the world itself—the world I had 
thought of as so immense, so full of delightful 


amazements on the day when I had looked 


7 {ol a A CHILD’S ROMANCE. 

over this wall after making my decision — was 
not this whole world shrunken and faded in my 
eyes, like this poor little landscape. 

The sight more especially of the gate of 
Bories, like a ghost of itself under the wintry 
sky, filled me with infinite melancholy. 

As I looked at it I was reminded of the 
sulphur butterfly, still in its glass case in my 
little museum; still in the same spot, with its 
hues as fresh as ever, while I had been sailing 
on every sea. For many years I had forgotten 
the association of the two things; and then, as 
the yellow butterfly recurred to my mind, re- 
called by the gate of Bories, I heard in my 
brain a piping voice, singing quite softly: “Ak / 
ah! la bonne histotre /’ The voice was strange 
and thin, but above all sad—sad enough for 
tears, sad enough to sing over a grave the song 


of vanished years and long dead summers. 


THE END. 











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